Remember and Forget
by ejosephinemachine
Summary: Lily Evans has problems. An ex-best friend. A sister who... is Petunia. A guilty conscience. She's determined to change. She's going to be fun. But fun is getting harder to come by in a world heading to war. If only she could be as reckless, and self-assured as James Potter and his friends. But they're changing too, and Lily's no longer as sure of the world as she once was.
1. A Summer of Suffering

Whatever he was doing, she didn't care. It wasn't her business any more whether the boy from Spinner's end was doing his potions homework, and she didn't care one way or another whether he mastered the freezing charm that he had been struggling with before... well, before the end of term. Technically, they didn't need to do any work. Having sat her OWLs, she and the rest of the new sixth years were not yet officially NEWT students and so couldn't really study, not knowing what subjects their grades would allow them to take. Still, it would have been a shock to everyone if Lily Evans, (reluctant) slug club member and rare Gryffindor favourite of the potions teacher, Professor Slughorn, had achieved anything less than an outstanding mark, and the usually cautious Lily allowed herself to buy several advanced potions textbooks that had been recommended to her by a winking Slughorn, chuckling through a slurp of wine at the end of term party. "You might find these interesting for some summer studying, and they would no doubt help if you were to take the NEWT." She didn't like to assume, the books had been expensive, and asking her father for the money had been difficult, she knew he was saving up to buy her a birthday present, though she told him not to. The basic course books were costly enough and more so when you added in potions ingredients, robes to replace the irretrievably stained ones she had needed to wear on the train home thanks to a hilarious, or, depending on who you asked, idiotic, prank courtesy of her fellow Gryffindors. As it turned out, large quantities of bowtruckle pus had gone missing while the feast was taking place and Professor Sprout occupied with honey glazed ham, and had turned up over the heads of the first years as they were approaching the train doors to go home. The first years had been hysterical, shrieking with laughter at the bleaching effect the liquid had, giving the impression that the platform of the train station had been the scene of a terrible accident, and was suddenly inhabited by a hundred ghosts. Lily had been shepherding the excitable children into carriages and had been splashed, drawing the deep red out of her hair and freckles from her skin until her colouring was like that of her sister, Petunia, although they could never have been mistaken for one another. Her robes were ruined, so new ones were needed. Petunia would complain, but she always did. Lily got more than she did apparently and Petunia hated that their father couldn't always afford to give them both everything they wanted. Lily didn't feel like she was favoured with money, she only stayed at home over Christmas, and summer, and Petunia seemed to have a new wardrobe of dresses every time Lily saw her, she didn't think she cared whether Petunia got more, she wasn't resentful in the same way that her sister was.

In any case, it was the need for new books, to tide her over until the NEWT results and book lists of required reading came in, that led to the first time since the end of term that she had seen Severus, on a trip to Diagon Alley, and to visit the wizarding world that she so missed during the long summer months.

She had asked for some money, and after a trip to Gringotts wizarding bank, she had started down the busy street, passing witches and wizards who were all struggling under the weight of their numerous bags. She had met up with a few of her Hogwarts school friends in Diagon Alley, and they had planned to spend a lazy day in the bookshop, joke shop and more than a little time in Ernest Fortescue's ice cream shop, where the owner's sons served ice creams; the elder charming and flirtatious with every girl who passed by, and the younger brother rarely raising his eyes from a large book, titled 'The Witch Burnings of the Middle Ages in Europe'. Lily had begged them to find a seat in the shade, her pale skin already reddening across the bridge of her nose, and, after the obligatory laugh at her expense, they complied. She fell down into the chair and tried to resist the temptation to press her face into the cool strawberry ice cream that had floated across to their table from the counter.

She looked across the table to where Jacqueline was comparing the shade of dress robes she had bought to Karen's, ensuring that they were not too similar. The two girls were Gryffindors, like Lily, and were awaiting OWL results, like her. Their feelings about this were markedly different. Jacqueline was completely unfazed, whereas Karen had begged Lily to send her letters on colourful paper, in bright envelopes so that she could tell from afar that it wasn't a Hogwarts letter. This seemed excessive, but to save herself from an argument, Lily had complied. It had given her a chance to use an expensive correspondence kit that Jac had given her. Jacqueline was from a wizarding family, pureblooded, though not intolerant of others, but her father put a great deal of pressure on his children to succeed, to be assets to the family name. Almost as a reaction to this, Jac had a determined kind of apathy, where she refused to care about school, grades or her future. Karen had a Muggle father, and a witch mother, but her father had only ever made infrequent appearances in his daughter's life, and was unaware of his daughter's abilities or her schooling arrangements. Karen seemed determined to be as immersed in a world that some might say she was only half a part of. Those same people would question Lily' s right to be in that world at all, and they had, vocally and frequently.

The three girls discussed the birthday party plans being made for Jac's birthday at the end of August. It was being touted as a last hurrah for summer, and was being held at her house, which her family referred to as the Shed, but which was far grander than that suggested, the guest list was a topic of great importance to Jac. All the Gryffindor sixth years of course, which consisted of two other girls, Lynn McLaren and Beth Podmore, and six boys. Adi Parson, a good friend of Lily' s and long-term crush of both Lynn and Karen, though neither knew of the others interest and Lily wasn't inclined to tell them, and Nigel Forester, who was very studious, perhaps a bit too fond of rules and their enforcement, a little pompous and who had been bereft when passed over for prefect in favour of the somewhat less rule-abiding Remus Lupin. Remus was lovely, Lily had always had something of a soft spot for him, not in a romantic way, but she thought he seemed very kind and he was often a softening force against his friends, the other three Gryffindors, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black and James Potter. Lily dreaded seeing them, all four of them, but especially Potter. She was a bit embarrassed, having shouted at him in a fit of rage and never apologising. She wasn't overly moved to say sorry to James Potter in many situations, but she genuinely had been quite horrible to him, though Jac, usually a defender of Potter, had grumbled that it served him right and that she hadn't said anything that wasn't true. Lily knew Jac didn't mean that, she had only said it upon seeing how upset Lily was about Severus, to lessen the number of things she had to obsess over. She would need to face Potter and his band of friends and supporters who would likely be less than her biggest fans.

She had received a few letters from Remus, and had written back, but they had both avoided any mention of the J-word, writing about exams (but not defence against the dark arts, after which the fight had occurred), the weather (sunny, sometimes cloudy, always boring) and a few bits of carefully selected stories of what they had done over summer, Remus wrote about a day at the beach "with friends" and a night where he had flooed to London and took "some people" to listen to some Muggle music. She knew who was there, and so did he, but neither acknowledged the great, festering problem. Remus probably disliked her for it, she supposed, but was too polite to ignore her letters, but too considerate to tell her what he thought of her, that she was an arrogant, hurtful cow and that she was being cruel. She had just been so upset an it was as if she had lost control, not in that shouting, incapable of thinking way but in the "I know exactly what to say to hurt you, and I'm going to say it" sort of way, and she regretted it, James was a bully but she had sunk to his level, and she was supposed to be better than that. The fact that it was James Potter, insufferable, arrogant Potter that had got to her irked her, though Severus had helped, the end of a seven year friendship was as raw as it could have been, but still, Potter had got to her, been in the wrong place and had suffered for it. She had to speak to him, he was always easy to find, just follow the sound of cheering, so she knew any party with James would mean she would see him, no chance of avoiding him. Desperate to avoid either of her friends asking her about Potter, or even hearing his name, as they were currently listing the invitees and would inevitably reach him, she jumped out of her chair and asked them if they wanted to go to Flourish and Blott's. The response was wordless, but unmistakable from their skewed eyebrows and unenthused faces. She would be shopping alone.

"We don't even know what classes we'll be in yet! Do you know your classes? Oh no! Do you know what your results are?" Karen panicked, her gentle amusement turning into fear.

"Of course she doesn't know! She's just willing to waste perfectly good gold on books, instead of being sensible and buying the green dress!" Lily laughed.

"When would I wear a dress like that? It's robes at Hogwarts, and I'm not exactly going to tea at the palace when I'm home." Jacqueline waved the reasoning away but let Lily go. Ducking around a particularly grumpy wizard carrying a large cactus-like plant, she reached Flourish and Blott's, perhaps her favourite shop in the whole world, with the exception of the one beneath her house, where her father sold anything and everything a person might need. Despite the lack of booklists, Lily always found there were at least fifty books on a range of magical topics interesting enough to read for pleasure within the shelves of the magical bookshop. Every time she entered the shop, a few books found their way into her hand and forced her to part with a few sickles from her purse.

Flourish and Blott's was beautiful. The sort of person who read only when required might not have seen it, but to Lily, it was heaven. Great stacks of books cluttered the floor as well as the shelves that covered every wall, and were, though it didn't look like it, organised by subject. She could have spent days in there and would have if it weren't for the whining of her friends when she dragged them in. Though they would all be coming back post-OWLs to buy the books and supplies for the next year, Lily always felt she was rushed for time. Indeed, there wasn't enough time in the day to even decide what books to read out of the plethora around her. She skimmed the charms section as usual, brushing her fingers wistfully against 'T. Evelyn' s Compendium of Charms', the thick, leather-bound tome that Flitwick kept behind his desk and only brought out to allow the most advanced Charms students to see, though touching the pages was forbidden. It was so expensive as to make her feel almost reverent, and she passed by to the Potions section, where she stopped to search through her bag and fished around for the crumpled napkin on which Slughorn had scrawled the names of several books. It would have been hard for Lily to guess how long she spent there, plucking books from the high shelves and comparing their titles to the professor's notes (Slughorn hadn't been overly precise, the result, no doubt, of several bottles of whiskey and wine that had been given as end-of-term gifts) and holding those she planned to buy in the crook of her arm.

Between the search, occasional distraction in the form of a book she hadn't heard of, and the constant checking of the total cost of her books, to make sure she didn't overspend, she didn't notice that she was not alone in the Potions section. She had found the final book, a thin, insignificant looking book called The Waters of Life and Death' that promised an in depth look at state-altering draughts, the potions that could make a person wake or sleep, healed or poisoned. Having completed the list, she turned to go and pay triumphantly and spotted immediately the pale boy, whose dark hair was to his shoulders and whose equally black eyes were fixed on her. The attention and interest that she had once found so comforting and genuine, now seemed sinister and unsettling. Nothing had changed in him, he still cared about her, he still was grateful for her friendship, all that was as it had been before, but he had brought to life all the dark thoughts she had hid from for years, in one word, and had altered her viewpoint irreparably. She knew that they couldn't be friends, his love of the dark arts had, in her mind, won out over any love for her. The truth of the situation was hard to see from her very involved position but she knew that one of them would be hurt if they stayed friends, she had known it for a long time and in the end, it had been her. That wasn't to say that he hadn't been suffering. He had always been pale, but now he was grey, always thin, now gaunt. His dark eyes were more soulless than deep. Smiles had never been common, but now they seemed to be totally foreign, his mouth was set determinedly down. Could she speak to him? Speaking to him would be dangerous, he might think that there was a chance of recovery if she ignored the incident at the lake, but mentioning it was impossible. Silence seemed to absolve him too, as if she was simply settling back into their easy way of walking around, no words passing between them. There really was no right answer here, at least not one that Lily could see.

"A little bit premature to be buying NEWT books, isn't it?" He questioned, and she could see all the hope and desperation behind the casual tone. When she replied, her voice was ice, she didn't mean to but found herself picturing Petunia and how she might respond, that was sure to drive him away.

"I was told by Professor Slughorn to buy these, actually. I think he might have told me if I didn't need them." He hadn't been expecting her to be so combative, she knew. His eyes widened and she could almost see the dread, this was exactly how he had feared it might go.

"I didn't mean that. I'm sure you'll pass. Of course you'll pass!" He seemed to be chiding himself for the mistake.

"Yes, of course I will." She said, surprising herself with her confidence. Throwing her hair over her shoulder she stomped past, making it very clear that the conversation was over.

"Lily, please..." he was begging now, all the pride that he cloaked himself in was abandoned. Her heart broke, but she held her resolve and spoke over whatever he might have been about to say.

"As far as I remember, the dark arts stuff is over there, Severus." Calling him Sev, like she used to, was out of the question but neither could she bring herself to use the cruel nickname she had used by the lake, Snivellus. Stopping pointedly to pick up a book from the Defence against the dark arts section, barely glancing the title, she paid and left, in too much of a hurry to chat to the shop owner at the counter, who usually recommended a few titles to her, recognising a fellow book lover. She hoped, as the reunited with Jacqueline and Karen, that he wouldn't try again and that the painful memory of their friendship might be allowed to fade.

"I am not, under any circumstances, bringing him to this house! We have to go to a restaurant, have to, or I'll just die!"

Petunia had made no secret of her feelings towards the family home. The Evans family weren't rich, but they were only quite poor in a very poor area, so they tended to seem financially comfortable. The house was really a flat, they lived above the shop that provided their only source of income, save for what Petunia had left after using her meagre salary from the office she deigned to work in to keep her dresses new and make up fresh. The shop, a sort of everything shop, was most frequently visited by children to spend their pocket money on the great jars of sweets, a thousand colours and sizes that were stacks on one wall. Petunia often admonished Lily for the extra sweets she gave to the kids she knew to be from poor families, but her father always smiled at that, and more often than not, he could be seen refusing money from the children, and even their parents on occasion. They were for this reason never short of cooked meals, often the bell would ring and there would be a child standing on the door with a dish of stew, or pot of soup and refusing that was not an option. The family were not unaware of suffering, shortly after Lily's second year, her mother had died, a short illness that left a long trail of devastation. Lily felt bad that when summer ended, she had returned to Hogwarts and Petunia had been left to deal with a father who, while not uninterested, was greatly weakened by the pain of his wife's death. Petunia had never mentioned it but the letters, which her mother had enforced and which had always been lengthy if dispassionate, had stopped abruptly. She had sensed that the love, the painful but present love that had forced the sisters to keep communicating, had shrivelled up, leaving resentment thinly veiled by politeness. Lily wasn't the sort to think of anything as a lost cause, but her relationship with Petunia was as close as Lily had ever got. Now, she mostly tried to maintain the uneasy peace that was settled between them. The distance ensured they could coexist but also made certain that the two sisters would never again be as close as they had once been. It was very difficult for Lily to keep herself silent when Petunia was being so openly dismissive of her own family. Their father, and mother while she was around, had often went without to provide their daughters with everything they wanted. Petunia's new boyfriend was the source of the issue this time, being that his family were of a higher class, in Petunia's mind at least, and that he might judge her for the fact that her family lived above a shop.

She had been listening to her sister's dramatics for too long and to save herself from the threat of expulsion should she have used the silencing charm that she was contemplating, she stood up, and was halfway down the dark, thin staircase that lead to the street below when her sister's whines became inaudible.  
She hadn't brought any money, nor did she have much, so after stuffing a handful of boiled sweets into her pocket, she wandered aimlessly through the streets, avoiding the shops and instead strolling past houses. She let her mind drift away from Petunia and began to look forward to the party at Jac's house, only a few weeks away now. She only had a few close friends, less one slytherin, but she was a friendly girl and well-liked among the students. She knew that the party would be fun, but then, a dinner date with an acromantula would be fun compared to weeks spent between Petunia and Severus. To be honest, if Hagrid, the school's groundskeeper with a passion for any creature that the general population might consider dangerous, was to be believed, it would be fun anyway.  
She couldn't wait to get back to Hogwarts, the classes would be harder but interesting and the people were always amusing, the world of wizards seemed to hold a pull over her and she hadn't lost the wide-eyed admiration and awe that everything magical inspired in her. Thoughts of the things she missed, the food, the ghosts, the teachers, even the antics of James Potter and Sirius Black would have been almost welcome to break up the monotony of this painfully slow summer. She laughed out loud at herself, the fact that she was missing Potter showed just how desperate she was. Deciding that she really ought to write to Jac and arrange to meet up, she made to turn back when she realised where she was.

The park was decidedly unremarkable. A lonely swing with its flaking paint sat alone, and a threatening steel fence ringed the sparse grass. It was a pitiful scene, but the plainness of the setting seemed wrong to her. This was where she had been that day with Petunia when flying off the swing had seemed fun, not illegal. The park had grown into something of a backdrop for the relationship between her and Severus, the swing had stood resolute, creaking out a soundtrack to the chattering of two young children. Really, she was the chatterer, Severus had only contributed answers at first, direct and perfunctory, but as they had grown, he had trusted more and began to, if not chatter, then at least speak more freely.  
That was all over now, there was no chance of recovery, but it felt almost natural when she looked out, to see the dark figure under a tree, shaded from the sun. She turned away, but didn't leave, though she couldn't have said why. Clutching the hard metal of the chains, warmed by the sun, she sank onto the plastic seat and swung gently, kicking the toes of her shoes, actually Petunia's shoes now that she looked at them, and dragging them forcefully across the ground as she swung forward. He had stood up at the sight of her, but he hovered now, he didn't know if she had seen him and he seemed scared to move in case she saw him and bolted. She wasn't really sure what she would do if he approached, she felt flustered and skittish, but she stayed, her head down, red hair falling to shield her face and obscure her vision.  
She pushed her legs against the ground, forcing herself back and forward with more force, reaching greater heights and feeling the air push her hair back. Fixing her eyes on the blue expanse of sky above, she tried to sort through the strange mixture of emotions, anger, hurt, frustration fought against pity, affection and guilt. Whether she was thinking about Severus or Petunia didn't really matter, the feelings were surprisingly similar considering they were so opposed to one another. They were more alike than either would ever admit. They both wished that Lily was different. Petunia wanted her to be 'normal', to give up magic like it was a bad hairstyle and just be ordinary. Severus wished that she wasn't muggleborn, that she was of proper blood or that, at the very least, she would be ashamed of her heritage and try to hide it. They both had hated that Lily tried or even wanted to have other friends, Petunia had hated Severus's intrusion on their life, and Severus had never encouraged Lily to be friends with anyone else, often making mean comments about the Gryffindors that had been the cause of a few arguments between them. Both Petunia and Severus cared about her. but when it came down to it, she was second to something else. Petunia cared more about seeming normal, appropriate and proper, and Severus cared more about seeming to be a good Slytherin.  
Musing on the similarities of the two people who she had been so sure would be in her life forever, she realised they were both embarrassed by her, she wasn't enough for either of them, no matter what she did, or how much she sacrificed, there would always be something, a huge part of who she was, that they would demand be forgotten or ignored.

Standing up, she left the swing, seeing even from the distance that Severus was disappointed, and started back home, popping a lemon sweet in her mouth and trying not to think about the fact that she had three weeks more of this purgatory before she could see her friends, her real friends, who didn't care about what she was, but who. Summer had never seemed such a burden.

She quickened her pace, already composing a letter to Jac about her horrible life and how likely it was that she would be completely insane by the time the party arrived. She thought about mentioning the fact that she was missing James Potter, to drive home her desperation, but decided against it. Some parts of your brain were best contained, and Lily had learned that in her case, anything Potter-related ought to go unmentioned.


	2. Letters in Quick Succession

Sorry, but just need to make a note that while this chapter is shorter than the first, the next part will be up quite soon. I had this bit written before I posted the first bit and didn't want to post it all at once but think I might as well, hope you like it.

Chapter Two

The day of the results had taken it's time in arriving but finally it came. Lily was woken by a faint tapping at the window which turned out to be an owl, not an OWL. Karen, it seemed, had been unable to sleep and had decided to spread her misery. It was five o'clock in the morning, and Lily was outraged at the intrusion on her dreamless sleep. Untying the letter, which was on lime green paper, Lily grumbled at the bird to come in and it obliged, fluttering across the room and settling on top of the birdcage, where Meredith, Lily's own owl, seemingly remained undisturbed by the new bird.

Setting herself back on her bed, she unfurled the note and read Karen's characteristically twirling handwriting.

Lily!  
Please be awake, and please don't be mad (angry), but I am awake, and quite possibly mad (mental). You can't be sleeping through this torture surely? If so, how are you sleeping? I tried counting sheep, but they turned into unicorns, and I remembered the question about unicorns in the Care of Magical Creatures exam, remember? I would try listening to music, but it is four in the morning and I don't actually want to be brutally murdered by my mum and receive my results as a ghost. Remember that time I had you all over to stay the night, and Jac was there, and we all decided to listen to that record, because Jac hadn't seen a record player, what was that, second year?

Write to me, tell me stories, tell me anything? How's the wonderful Petunia?

I saw Peter yesterday in Diagon Alley, and he was a bit cross with you, I think they all are. He didn't actually say anything about it, but I got the sense, you know how I sense these things, being a divination prodigy! (Oh God, do you think you can fail divination? it's not my fault my Crystal ball was all smudged with fingerprints and all I could see was where someone had drawn a smiley face).

Anyway, you're going to have to see them all at Jac's house, she won't un-invite them, even for you. Seen anyone from school, other than Snape? Hope you write a long, but quick response, even if you only want to arrange to meet in Diagon Alley, I'd be so grateful, and you know that even though you're annoyed right now, you still like me... deep down.  
Write back, Evans!  
or just do me a favour and send me some poison, end it all now!  
Love from your poor, tormented but hopefully intelligent and soon to be qualified to OWL level friend,  
Karen

The letter made Lily laugh and she immediately reached for some parchment, a lurid orange colour, and began a response.

Karen.  
I was mad (angry) at being woken up at FIVE IN THE MORNING but since I myself am close to going mad (mental), I have forgiven you enough to write back. My madness is not from (completely unwarranted) exam result stress, but loneliness.

Petunia is as delightful as ever, she's still blind though judging from the fact that she is still dating Vernon ( remember the time you visited and she refused to bring her new boyfriend in and he sat in his car and drove off like a dementor was after him, that's Vernon dearest). She's been trying to ignore me, as far as possible, but I persist in breathing, which irritates her to no end!  
It's clear that you are desperate, if you're even willing to exploit my guilt over the Potter situation. Was Peter really mad (annoyed /irritated /judgmental)? I think the situation would be a lot clearer if it had been Sirius you had met. I am dreading the party for that, but also desperate for it because I'm so lonely.

You won't fail divination, the examiners might not be the easiest to please, but they're understanding! When I did my divination exam, I predicted her death and she was a good sport about it, the examiner will understand that you're under pressure, don't worry about that one!

I've seen no one from school, of course, I'm a pariah, a leper, cast off from wizarding society, adrift in a sea of isolation... you get the drift (get it, drift...sea, haha!)  
Evans wrote back!  
What's with the nickname, no one calls me Evans, well, not you at least!  
Let's meet soon, are you busy today? We can go and get our NEWT supplies and have a celebratory ice cream/butterbeer this afternoon? Please say yes, I'm so lonely!  
Love from your fellow poor, tormented friend,  
Lily

She twisted the string around the paper and sent the bird off as Meredith ruffled her feathers indignantly. She had woken to find another bird being used to deliver post and taking the insult deep. She didn't like to see Meredith, though she was a bird, looking so reproachful and she tried to think of someone else who might be awake to send a letter to.

Jac would send back a curse or a howler for waking her, and Lynn and Beth wouldn't find it funny, they'd just be annoyed. She briefly considered Remus, but kindly decided against sending it right away.  
"I'll write some letters, and you can take them later, okay? That's a big job for a very intelligent owl."  
She spent an hour writing about one page of chatter to Jac, and shorter, but friendly ones for Remus, Lynn and Beth. Then, more to have something to do than actually to send it, she began to draft another letter, to Severus. She abandoned it within three lines, realising that she had nothing to say, she didn't want to apologise, she had nothing to apologise for as far as she could see and she didn't want to fix it. It, their relationship, was broken, and it was better off that way, because it wasn't healthy or helpful to either of them. She started again, writing not to Severus, but to Potter.

Dear Potter,

No.

James,

No.

Hello Prat face,

Probably best avoided.

Focus on the content first, she told herself, everyone knows that the opening greeting is the trickiest.

So...

I don't really think that anything I said by the lake was too far from the truth, but I feel guilty and I think a lot of people hate me for saying it, so I suppose that they all must disagree with it. Maybe, you are a good person, I wouldn't know, and it is possible that you are not entirely awful. I mean my best friend turned out to be a blood purist and ashamed of me, so perhaps I'm a terrible judge.

In short, I am sorry if I hurt your feelings. Perhaps it's for the best, people who like me tend to end up hating me, so I saved us both some time.

She crossed out the last line, then folded the paper in half and tucked it into the front page of one of the extra potions books she had bought.  
Checking the alarm clock, she groaned. It had taken only an hour and a half to write to all her friends.

She added a very polite note to Nigel, asking how his appeal to Dumbledore to change the two prefect per house rule had fared, and enquiring about his results.  
Ten more minutes and she had written to Adi, whose letters were always entertaining but never prompt.  
Ten more minutes yielded letters to Alice, her Hufflepuff friend, a prefect going into her seventh year who was unlikely to be awake until midday.  
Then, another apology attempt to James.  
Then, a results enquiry to the Ravenclaw prefects, Jessica Rolfe and Thaddeus Moore who were always willing to write back with friendly greetings but who rarely corresponded with her of their own accord.  
Another to Severus, ripped up on completion.  
Another to Karen, telling her to write quicker, abandoned on realising she would have to end Meredith away with it.

Finally, she wrote to Potter, with a polite note, very like that to the Ravenclaws, asking about his summer, his results and wishing him well. She kept the tone light, more friendly than she had ever addressed him in person, but she thought he would probably be able to tell that the tone was by way of an apology for the shouting thing. He was a clever boy, he'd understand what she meant.

It wasn't until she had tied the note to Meredith's foot and sent her out the window that she realised both that it was written on bright pink paper, and that it would arrive not long after seven o'clock on exam results day. She doubted he would thank her for that.

Karen's reply came moments later but Lily was already in the throes of panic about what the letter to Potter would do, what he would think, was it rude, was she wrong to try and skate over the shouting, would he even care...  
Karen noted in her letter that Peter had gotten a bit sour when Lily's name was mentioned, and hadn't said anything about her, usually he would stammer a compliment about whoever was being discussed, but his silence spoke volumes. She also agreed to meet Lily that afternoon which almost made Lily forget about her many problems. She forced herself to sit and read through a page of panicked writing, consisting of Karen's analysis of the various things that she thought had gone wrong in each of the ten exams she had sat. After dutifully dismissing each mishap, though Herbology, or her description of it, sounded disastrous, with a misidentification of a leaf pattern leading to a near strangulation only prevented by Karen's quick hand with a pair of secateurs.

After the duty was fulfilled, she wrote a quick version of the Potter letter and the accidental sending off at half past seven to a boy who didn't seem the early rising type, especially on a results morning and who must dislike her anyway.

She decided that breakfast might be a good distraction from everything and she climbed down from her room. Although they lived in a flat above a shop, Lily had her bedroom in what might have been the attic, it had once been the nursery and then a playroom when Lily and Petunia were younger but since Hogwarts, sharing a bedroom with her sister had been torture and the attic had seemed like a better idea. It was accessed by a circular staircase that wound upwards, like the one up to Gryffindor tower, and was lit through a large paned window. It had low ceilings and wooden walls that had seemed to 11 year old Lily to be like a pirate ship.

Climbing down the stairs still felt like going 'below deck' and she smiled at the idea, but the smile was stopped when she reached the foot of the stairs and met the angry face of Petunia, who had apparently been disturbed. Lily didn't have to wait long to find out the reason.  
"Are you trying to make my life difficult? I have a date with Vernon this afternoon, he's taken the day off work especially to take me to the country, and I'm woken up at this time, on a holiday, thanks to my sister and her bizarre menagerie in the attic!"  
"The birds? Is it the owls that are bothering you?" Lily asked obtusely, wondering how she might have quietened the two owls.  
"Of course it is! Flapping their wings outside my window!"  
"Well, Tuney" she saw her sister scowl at the childish name, but continued. "that's how birds stay in the air, you see?"  
Petunia had said enough and stomped off, slamming the bathroom door.  
"Good luck on your results, Lily! I'm sure you'll do great!" Lily muttered, quietly enough that only she could hear.

She could practically hear Petunia sucking on her teeth through the door, but there was nothing she could do now, so she continued down the hall to the kitchen, where her father was already preparing a breakfast.

"Morning, trouble!" He shouted, smiling brightly and shuffling his feet to the song on the radio. Petunia couldn't possibly have heard the birds over the sound of the radio. Lily knew that it was the presence of the birds, not exactly a usual method of receiving post, that might be seen by the neighbours that irked Petunia. It was a reminder that Lily wasn't ordinary, the thing that Petunia longed for and valued above all else.

"Morning, Dad!" Lily yelled. "Bit loud?"

"Not at all, little one! It's Elvis, can't be too loud!"

Lily joined in, dancing around her father, pulling the frying pan out of the way of his vigorous arm swings, and saving a glass of orange juice before he attempted a spin that would have sent it flying. She let herself be spun around to the music and felt an unwilling smile force its way onto her lips as he dramatically dipped her.

"Stop it! I'm trying to be serious!"

"Why?" he deepened his voice to sound as serious as he could. He wasn't a serious person and the result was laughable.

"Today is a very serious day. We must be serious. Don't you know, it's Petunia's big date with Vernon who, I'll have you know, has taken the day off from work to take her to the country!"

"The country?" He pretended to swoon. "What a keeper that one is! Vernon Dursley, truly a prince among men."

"He's worth more than ten normal men put together!"

"Well, he is if you're paying per pound of weight!"

"Dad! Don't be mean!" Lily tried, she really did try, to look severe, but it was hard to support Petunia's ridiculous blinkered attitude towards Vernon. She saw nothing wrong with him. She argued that that was what happened when you were in love. Lily hoped not.

Love, to Lily, was seeing every flaw. Seeing every single misplaced hair and bumpy scar, hearing how they mispronounced certain words and feeling annoyed when they were being sarcastic, or arrogant, and loving them anyway.

Obsession saw no faults. Obsession and wilful avoidance, and it must have taken a lot of will for Petunia to avoid Vernon Dursley's faults. Not his weight, or his looks, neither Lily nor her father were really so shallow, but his personality. He had a love for average that Petunia shared, and he judged those he considered beneath him harshly. Lily didn't like to think that her sister could be compatible with such a horrible person, but there were a certain number of similarities in their attitude towards others. They both found Lily and her entire existence to be distasteful. Trying to put Petunia out of her head, she returned the frying pan to the heat and resumed the cooking, humming along to the ending of the song.

Lily finished making breakfast, and served it up on two plates, Petunia always ate separately, and they started to eat. The meals at home were always simple, Hogwarts food was a cut above, but there was something sad about the room, with its dining table for four and it's framed pictures on the walls, demonstrating just how far the family that had once shared every evening in this room had grown apart. Lily missed her mother, but there was a more urgent ache caused by Petunia's absence. Her mother was gone, beyond her reach and her memory beyond tainting, their relationship would stay always as it had been when she was twelve, never souring with age. Her sister was in many ways just as lost to her as her mother, but she was still present, Lily had to speak every day to the girl that had once been her best friend, but who now wished she didn't exist. The continued presence of Petunia in Lily's life hurt, and yet allowed her to hope, which was the worst sort of feeling. She chewed her way through the breakfast, watching her father reading his paper, and occasionally flipping a page in her newest textbook, though not really seeing anything. They were both waiting for the results, though Lily knew her father wouldn't mention it until she did. She waited and waited, focussing on cutting up her bacon into increasingly smaller pieces. She was working her way through a second sausage when she saw, through the lace-curtained window, a dark shape against the white sky.


	3. A Turn Up for the Books

As the owl descended, it's wings flapping in a way that would have surely infuriated Petunia, Lily felt a strange flipping in her stomach, she knew what it was. It calmed her to think that Karen was probably ten times more nervous. Her father, seeing her fixate on the window, followed her gaze carefully. When she glanced over to him, panic-stricken, he focused on his egg, pretending not to see until she wanted him to.

Trying to untie the letter from the bird wasn't easy but soon she was staring at a sheet of parchment, with a neat list of subjects and a letter beside each.

Ordinary Wizarding Levels  
Lily Evans

Charms - O  
Transfiguration - E  
Potions - O  
Defence Against the Dark Arts - E  
Herbology - E  
Astronomy - E  
Care of Magical Creatures - O  
Ancient Runes - E  
Divination - A  
History of Magic - A

It was better than she had been hoping for, three O grades, and all passes, Divination was surprising, given her complete lack of aptitude and History of Magic was a triumph, given the sleep-inducing voice of Professor Binns. Already she was debating which NEWTs to pursue. Charms and Potions obviously, and Transfiguration was useful, as well as Defence against the Dark Arts, which seemed worthwhile in light of the current state of the wizarding world. Thinking then of Karen, she finished talking to her father, who didn't really understand the grades or the subjects but was thrilled to hear that she had done so well. She returned upstairs to find an owl, fortunately not Meredith, waiting on her.  
Karen wrote only to confirm good grades, and give a time and place: end of your street, 12 o'clock. The lack of mention of the Potter situation either meant she wanted to talk about it in person or that she was so scatterbrained in the wake of results that she hadn't read the letter fully. Lily assumed the latter and dressed quickly, having arranged for Karen's mother to side-long apparate her to Diagon Alley.

Soon she was standing on the pavement, looking for the short, dark haired witch and listening for the tell-tale 'pop' that accompanied apparition. The witch appeared out of the trees that fringed one side of the street, and seemed to brighten at the sight of Lily, relieved not to be kept waiting.

"Hope your results were good? Karen was intolerable all summer, but you probably know that, so thank heavens that she passed everything! how has your holiday been?"  
Polite conversation dispensed with, Lily found herself being pulled to the woman's side, linking their arms together. Then she was exposed to the strange, squashing sensation that accompanied apparition. Seconds later, she was on another street, a very different street, and Mrs. Coleridge was pulling her into a hug, telling her not to let Karen buy any transfiguration books and disappearing in a flash. She realised, with an uneasy pang, that Meredith still hadn't returned. Did the Potters' live very far away or had he killed her bird in some sadistic revenge. She didn't adore the boy, but she gave him enough credit to think that he probably wasn't the bird-killing type. Though you never could be certain.

She was considering the possible bird murderer when she reached Karen who pounced on Lily enthusiastically.  
"I passed! Evans, I passed every bloody class! No Outstanding grades, but who needs those when I PASSED!"  
It was hard not to get caught up in the spirit and Lily passed her the certificate listing her own grades. Karen was a worrier, and she could be insufferable when it came to exam stress, but her good side was that she never grudged anyone their success, she was so happy for Lily and would have been even if she had failed.  
"Congratulations, Lily! I'm so proud of you! Do you know what NEWTs you want to take?"

As it turned out, Karen had an A in transfiguration, not the E needed for NEWT as taught by the strict head of Gryffindor house, Professor McGonagall. Her mother's words made sense, Karen could try all she liked to beg and plead but she wouldn't be sitting a transfiguration NEWT. Her mood hardly seemed dampened by the news though and the two girls, after a friendly chat with Beth, set off to stock up.

It was only after the shopping was over, sitting with two cold butterbeers, that Karen remembered a brief mention of a situation involving Potter.  
"Tell me from the start, now that I'm not mad, what happened?"  
Lily told her, through sips of the frothy drink, about the nervousness making her write all the letters, and how she wrote a few to Potter, and then she sent it before realising what time it was.  
"But Meredith wasn't back by the time I left, which means either he lives very far away from me, or he's murdered her."  
Karen laughed at this, which comforted Lily somewhat, obviously he wouldn't kill an innocent bird. When Karen stopped laughing, which took a little longer than entirely necessary in Lily's opinion, she seemed to have some questions, which she asked through pensive sips of her butterbeer.  
"What did the letter say?" she asked, and when Lily told her, she frowned. "Why did you write to him? You never have before."  
"It's your fault! If I hadn't been awake, I never would have written all those letters. It wasn't just Potter, I even wrote one to Nigel!"  
Karen had to be thumped on the back to save her from choking on her butterbeer and the hysterical laughter that followed made Lily flush a deep red.  
"Look, I'm a nice person! it was a nice letter, and there's nothing weird about it, I can write to whoever I want."  
"Yes, but my question is, why did you want to write to James Potter?"  
"Dunno, guilt maybe. I feel a bit bad about shouting at him."  
"He was being a prat, bullying Snape and then asking you out in front of everyone! As if you'd ever say yes to someone asking you out like that!"  
"What do you mean?" Lily frowned, she didn't think she would refuse anyone, just idiots like Potter.  
"You'd never go out with James Potter, not this side of the apocalypse anyway."  
"Fair enough, but I still feel bad!"  
"You'd feel bad about breathing too much air, Lily! But I take your point, still it might be a bit odd, a letter out of the blue, no mention of the whole 'I'd rather snog the Giant Squid than you' thing!"  
"I didn't say that! I said I'd rather go on a date with the Giant Squid than Potter." She flushed, knowing she had made it worse, and seconds later, Karen asked.  
"Oh really, so that means you'd rather snog Ja-"  
"Oh, leave it alone! C'mon, let's go do some Muggle shopping! I want to show you this dress I might buy!"

As they walked back down the wizard street, towards the pub that acted as a gateway between this world and the muggle street on the other side of the wall, Lily skilfully avoided any further mention of the Potter situation. A big part of her knew that Karen was right. She owed James Potter nothing, no apology for what she had said, she didn't have to say she was sorry. She had been right. He was a bully, and she was standing up to him, and there was nothing wrong with that. Still, she was Lily Evans and she was guilty by nature. She had a habit of seeing herself as being in the wrong, no matter what. Putting the guilt as far from her mind as she could, she thought about the first time she had walked down this street.

All those years ago, at age eleven, the entire world had seemed to buzz with colour. Carts sold sweets in the street, great trays of roasted chestnuts were being cooked in front of them as Lily had fallen through the wall into this new world, clutching her father's hand and tugging him forward, in awe at everything she saw, the scents, she could still recall picking out liquorice and melting butter in the air, the jingling of the bells that signalled an entrant into one of the many shops that lined the street. People had seemed happier. It was the increased pressure on the Ministry from the blood-purity fanatics, led by the shadowy Lord Voldemort. It worried Lily that, at best, the Ministry was a weak opposition, and at worst, downright in the pocket of those with money, who tended to be the old, wealthy pure-blood families. Families with proud names, and even prouder hatred of muggles and everything associated with them. The lack of opposition worried Lily, and many others clearly, judging by the lack of activity in the shops. The Muggle street was buzzing, and Karen and Lily were soon swallowed up in the crowd, making a careful note of where they had to return to before heading into the first shop.

Returning home on the arm of Mrs Coleridge was even worse, clutching numerous bags made the squeezing feeling worse, but she arrived, unsquashed and was soon climbing her stairs and throwing the bags on her creaking bed.

Meredith was back, Lily noticed, but for some reason she couldn't quite work up the courage to look for a note. She hated being disliked, and the idea that her bird, thankfully alive, might be carrying proof that someone existed who thought Lily was a terrible person, someone besides her sister that is, was too much to face. She removed each book from the large bag, piling them high on her desk, arranging them by subject, ready to be packed. Then she did the same with potions ingredients, her new phial set and the few items bought on the Muggle street that backed onto the wizarding streets, a bracelet that Karen had insisted on buying her, as a early Christmas/congratulations on exams present, made of bright coloured gemstones forming a chain of tiny lilies. Karen had accepted a similar one, though they couldn't find a chain of tiny Karens, she chose one with stars, and they pooled their money to buy a third, with gems forming spirals around the wrist, for Jacqueline as a birthday present. She had been unable to join them thanks to family celebrations, but had told Karen she had passed everything except History of Magic.  
Finally, she steeled herself and called to Meredith, who raised her leg lazily, there was a letter.  
The first promising sign was that it was plain, cream coloured parchment, not the red sort that signalled a howler. So he wasn't going to swear at her audibly. That was good.

She muttered to herself the things that Karen had told her, that she had been right, that she had been faultless, that it was he who ought to apologise, all the things that, with a bit of objectivity, she might have known to be true.

A humming mantra of affirmations passing her lips, she opened the letter.

Dear Lily  
Thanks for your letter, summer has been nice, if a bit boring. I've been spending a lot of time with Sirius (who says hello!) and Pete and Remus have been over a lot. Remus mentioned he had wrote to you, and that your summer was dragging a bit, is that why you're writing me?  
My results got here right after your bird, sorry for keeping her a while! I passed everything, and should be able to continue to NEWT in my favourite subject, transfiguration. McGonagall will be thrilled!  
How did you do? I know you passed potions because the world still seems to be turning! but the subjects in which you aren't a prodigy?  
Hope everything if good, and not too boring where you are (where are you? I don't think I've ever asked where you live!) I've been invited to Jac's house, so see you there maybe?  
Nice to hear from you,  
James

She felt the way a bomb disposal expert must feel after seeing the countdown clock stop at one second to go, the relief was palpable. She didn't have to talk about the lake, the shouting or any of it, she could just be civil to Potter for a while so that he knew she was sorry and then they could go back to normal!

She knew she had been right, the tone had done enough. She thought vaguely that James Potter was far more pleasant in writing than he ever seemed in person.  
She danced around her room, a weight she hadn't known she was carrying lifted, putting on a record with the kind of music Petunia had declared to sound grubby, like music could sound unwashed, because it wasn't classical, a century old and there were no violins. Dancing around she passed her window, which was set out of the roof and stretched from floor to the height of the roof, and her attention was drawn to the street below. She was uncomfortable, but not surprised, when she saw Severus below. She couldn't help but wish he would leave.

He wasn't like this before, begging, pleading and following her around and she knew that it was the result of complete desperation. The fact that his pride had driven her away was making him think that abandoning it would bring her back. She knew that she couldn't go back, to the time when she had allowed herself to be hidden, she had sat at a separate table in the library, and talked only when no Slytherins were around. She couldn't be friends any more with someone who only deigned to be her friend, who was embarrassed by her. Whatever he might say, she couldn't help but hear, louder than any apology, the venom in his eyes and voice and the words 'filthy little Mudblood'.

They had only been words, just simple, harmless words, words that didn't really mean anything, but they represented a lot. They meant more when the people they described were being driven from positions of power, and when a current of inequality ran underneath the whole society. She had heard it, 'she's pretty, for a muggleborn', 'what a bright girl she is, especially considering her parentage!'. Even Slughorn, dear old Slughorn, was quick to commend Lily on her intelligence, and showed an element of surprise at her Muggle parents, going so far as to mention regularly famous wizards named Evans, and also those known to be redheaded, as if they were all related.

All the resentment bubbled up as she looked down at her old friend, but she simply pretended to be opening the window rather than looking through it, and returned to her dancing, part of her hoping that he would see how happy she seemed and leave her be. She hated herself for it, she felt so guilty, and part of her wanted to accept his apology and be his friend again but she couldn't, something she thought of as selfish but which Jac called intelligent, stopped her, she couldn't live any more as Severus's friend. They wanted different things, and in order for them both to carry on down their chosen paths, their friendship was a necessary sacrifice. Even so, she couldn't deny that it hurt.


	4. The Calm before the Storm

Perhaps it was the results arriving, or the fact that she no longer dreaded seeing James Potter, but the days seemed to pass quickly. She had written back to James and after sending out the other letters, she spent some time trying to keep track of which letters she had answered. Most were short but Nigel had responded with two pages of analysis of his results, and a discussion of Dumbledore's unfair rejection of his prefect idea, which Lily privately appreciated as Remus was entertaining and fun to be with, but she sensed Nigel would give her slightly more work. She wrote back as much as she could, with her condolences, but suggesting he might still be made head boy, as they could be selected from the entire year. His next letter was optimistic, mentioning that he would fully support her for Head Girl. That gave her a laugh, the head girl role was essentially already chosen, the Slytherin prefect, Ivy Nott, was the perfect choice, threatening physically at a height over that of most boys, and a permanent scowl set into the lines of her overly mature face. She had a reputation for punishing rule breakers with severity, and never failed to deduct some house points when patrolling the corridors. Lily would fear for her life if she ever had anything that Ivy Nott wanted, especially a badge with a sharp pin attached. It wasn't a stretch to imagine it finding its way into her throat should Ivy be passed over.

Still, days passed in letters sent and received. Jac wrote, inviting her to stay for the day before and after the party. She would be returning home only to sleep and then leave for the station to go to Hogwarts. She accepted and set about packing up everything she might need for the next year into her trunk. Books were piled neatly next to clothes, the robes plain black but her red and gold tie and scarf showing the house to which she belonged. After a day of debating every item, she was ready to leave. Her father was a bit annoyed, mostly because she was leaving only hours before Petunia's big dinner, with Vernon coming to the house for a meal, Petunia having lost the restaurant/home battle. He was annoyed that Lily would escape the torment, but glad to see her so happy.

She was met, on the same corner as before, by Karen and her mother, having arranged to be apparated to the Prewett house with Mrs Coleridge. Lily couldn't apparate alone yet so she needed an adult and Mrs Coleridge was always happy, if hurried, to bring Lily along.  
The Prewett family was old, one of the noble lines, that had retained 'purity' through generations, though they held little pride in their blood status, unlike many others, such as the Black family or the Malfoys. Still, ages had been kind to them and they were able to maintain several homes, not to mention having several branches, so that Jacqueline was one of five or so roughly similar aged Prewett cousins. The poorly-nicknamed Shed in which they lived made Lily's house look like a hovel, and was enhanced by the candles in every window, and colourful lights that seemed to illuminate the facade of the house. Clearly, the party had been prepared for, though it was hours away. Mrs Coleridge was welcomed by Jac's parents, and they told the two girls where to find Jac.

Karen and Lily whispered as they walked up a white marble staircase, and under a golden chandelier.

"D'you think we've dressed too plainly?" Karen asked, looking around at the opulent surroundings. Lily almost felt that she needed to screw up her eyes, the hallway was so bright.

Jac had suggested that it was simply a house party, but the parents at the gate, and the elaborate lights was making Lily's yellow sundress and Karen's paisley print shift dress seem overly casual. The green dress from the Muggle eveningwear shop near Diagon Alley seemed more appropriate to this remarkable setting.  
Jacqueline was easy to find, from following the sound of Muggle music blaring, easy to distinguish from wizarding music. Music from the magical community was generally a little more dated, like Lily's parents music, and also had a lot of references to hippogriffs or trolls.

Jac's room, though ten times the size, was very similar in decor to Lily's room, the pale colours and floral bed sheets suggesting she had been here since a child, but with posters and photographs plastered over every wall showing the growth. Lily could see herself and Karen in many, the Gryffindor common room making several appearances, as well as many other familiar faces and places.  
Jac and Lily on the grounds, under the big tree.  
Lily and Karen at dinner, during a competition to eat the most chips.  
Karen and Lynn, flying a broomstick down at the Quidditch pitch.  
Jac and Beth, outside the boys dormitories, giggling as they dared one another to try the stairs to see if they were allowed up.

"Ahhh!" Jac saw them in the doorway and jumped, hugging them forcefully and pulling them inside the room.  
"How are you both? Has your summer been good? Guess who I saw?" these questions all came in very quick succession and answers weren't really required. She continued.  
"Sirius! He mentioned you!" she narrowed her eyes at Lily. "what's all this about you writing Potter love letters?"  
Lily hadn't really been listening, but the last part drifted through and Karen just had time to shield her ears before Lily exploded.  
"What?!" she shrieked, her face took only a second to turn a bright tomato red, and the transformation from calm, to indignation was immediate. "Did he say that? I knew he was just as horrible as ever!" she blistered, falling furiously into silence.  
"Oh, calm down! Sirius just said you wrote a letter, that James wouldn't let him read it, and that he wrote about twelve versions before sending one back. Did you write to him?"  
Lily realised she hadn't told Jac the story, and proceeded to, leaving out the bit where she danced around the room on seeing he wasn't going to make a big deal about the fight. It just wasn't really relevant.  
The story had sent Jacqueline's eyebrows steadily upwards and a smile had grown on her lips.  
"God, Lily, you're such a... you're a real martyr, aren't you?" She rolled her eyes and smiled reasonably. "James can't figure you out, and I'm starting to see why! You scream at him, or snap at him, or even hex him and then feel guilty and act nice to make up for it, that's your pattern, and it must be doing a number on the poor boy."  
Lily didn't know what she was talking about, what gave her the impression that James Potter had spent any time at all trying to 'figure her out', and how would he have struggled to do it, she was straightforward, everyone snapped sometimes and must surely feel guilty for it.  
"What d'you mean, that's my pattern? I don't have a pattern!"  
"Oh but you do, dearest! A very confusing, hard to understand pattern, but it's there, you have known James for five full years, and in all that time, you've never been friends, you're friends with everyone, but not him, either you hate him and he's immature and arrogant, or you're feeling bad for calling him those things and you're overly polite and formal, until he blows up a greenhouse, or sets Peeves loose in the divination classrooms, when you start screaming."  
"Okay..." She nodded resentfully. "but that thing with Peeves really was awful, those crystal balls were expensive, and that tea was scalding, someone could really have gotten hurt."  
It was hard to maintain her severity when both her friends were cackling at her. It wasn't funny but she laughed along. She wasn't oblivious, and so she noticed the look that passed between Karen and Jac, a smirking, knowing look that Lily could only roll her eyes at, not being certain about what it meant.

"Look, you were right to tell him off, and you shouldn't feel guilty about it, but you do, because you're Lily and you're both painfully stubborn and self-doubting. You ought to either tell him off, and stick to it, or don't tell him off. I'm not saying you were wrong, you're not!"  
Jac nodded her head, as if that was the end of it, and turned the record up. Jac started to pull dresses from her wardrobe, holding up each, and asking for opinions. Karen clarified that the party wasn't a ball, and Jac assured them that her parents were leaving. They spent a while waiting for Jac to try on the many dresses, and then, when a pale blue dress was chosen, Jac turned her attentions to her friends, to their dismay.  
"Lily, really? Yellow?" She wrinkled her nose questioningly. Lily looked around for something to throw and Jac cackled.  
"I'm kidding, you look lovely. Nicer than I do, which is a problem! Kidding!" she shouted, as Lily found a shoe, and she danced away into the bathroom.

The hours before a party were always Lily's favourite. The air seemed to buzz with excitement, as if all the different things that could happen that night were waiting, hanging in the air and shouting out, she could almost hear the music and voices that would fill the halls, and she couldn't wait. She had offered to help the house elf set things up, which mostly seemed to involve putting the various pieces of expensive artwork, vases, paintings and a particularly elaborate marble sculpture from Spain that was covered by cloth and hidden in an upstairs locked bedroom, hopefully safe from harm. She had helped bring in several cases of 'juice' which required Jac's parents to be skilfully distracted by the innocent looking Karen. Clearly her parents had not been involved in all aspects of the party planning process.  
Lily was a sorter by nature, she often found herself picking up litter and ensuring not too much damage was done by the partygoers, she liked to think that parents of her friends would see her as responsible and sensible, though she bore a lot of teasing from her friends as being dull and mothering them. It wasn't really true, she knew how to enjoy herself and did so occasionally, but she preferred to actually celebrate something, the atmosphere was just better when there was that excitable, cheer-filled fervour of triumph, like after the final Quidditch match of the year, where, if Gryffindor had won, which she had to admit they did frequently thanks to James Potter, the entire house would pour themselves into the Common Room and dance and sing and cheer, until their voices were hoarse and their vision blurred.

This was Jac's birthday, and knowing Jac, it would be long, loud and someone would end up crying. She was prepared to comfort most people, but drunken ones were rarely easily managed, and she often grew a little frustrated when she realised they were upset over something ridiculous. Still, Lily knew that it would be fun, and as the hours drew on and Jac's parents left by floo, with assurances that they would be home mid-afternoon tomorrow, and a final kiss to their daughter, followed by a mouthed gesture to Lily to keep her sober from Jac's father, the anticipation grew. Lily tried to attribute the slight twisting in her stomach to excitement, or perhaps hunger, but she knew that she was nervous. Everyone invited were Hogwarts people, most of whom had last seen her screaming at James Potter, being called a Mudblood by her (former, she had to remind herself) best friend, and then retreating to her room until she could sneak onto the train and hide in the prefects carriage, which no one used on the trip home, having had enough with duties and wanting to spend their last few hours with their friends. She couldn't pretend that she was looking forward to the awkward conversations, the overly-jolly enquiries about her summer and her results, all the while knowing that half of them were pitying her and the other half judging her for not making a public and tear-filled apology to James Potter. She wasn't self centred enough to think that most of them would have given her a second thought, but when they ran into her, they would remember. She didn't want them to remember, she wished she could have erased the memory of everything between the end of the Defence exam and the train home. Part of her had even wished she hadn't went over, hadn't intervened in the bullying, but she didn't know who she would be if she hadn't, that was Lily's place, she stopped bullies from bullying, and she couldn't, no matter how painful the consequences, regret that action.  
Feeling like a diver, taking a final breath before immersion, she prepared for the night ahead. Maybe everyone would forget that she had been at the lake, maybe they were all so relieved to have exams over that their brains refused to retain the memory of the red-haired girl cutting James Potter apart and being humiliated for her trouble.


	5. The Eight People to Avoid

She had overestimated the effect of post-exam relief, it seemed. Nigel was the first to arrive, and he greeted her with a hearty handshake and a smile.  
"Lily! Great to see you, must say, it was a surprise to hear from you over the summer!" Karen and Jac exchanged glances, eyes glittering with amusement. "Always thought you were a Lupin supporter, but maybe next year we'll really get a chance to clean up the school, sort the trouble makers out. You and me could make quite an efficient team!" Jac had tears in her eyes, and Karen was mouthing her support for the Nigel and Lily 'team', though she seemed to be implying something that Nigel really wasn't. At least, she hoped he wasn't. "I dare say Dumbledore's already chosen the Heads, hard to say what that old codger's thinking though!" He accepted a glass of something from Karen, who hadn't been offering it to him, and slugged it down before continuing. "Also, terribly sorry to hear about your little scuffle with Potter at the lake, I heard Juni McDade say it was a real sight, and well, Severus Snape was quite out of order from what I understand of it, you're better off out of that group, Lily. I know you don't think so now, but he's going nowhere, and he'd take you with him given half a chance. You, well, you could do quite well in the Ministry, or perhaps in Healing, who knows. The point is, there's no future in this 'blood purity' malarkey, it'll fizzle out, they tend to and when it does-" he only stopped because Jac, whose face had grown serious at the mention of the Lake, and downright fierce at Severus' name, pulled Nigel away, remarking that she ought to give him a tour. Karen was at Lily's side in an instant, apologising for not dragging him away sooner, and Lil, who found Nigel harmless, if a bit tactless, was touched by how concerned her friends were. She had grown closer to them over the summer, the barrier being Severus, who had urged her away. Though they had always been close, they seemed to have rallied around her after the fight, and almost made it their job to protect her. It was strange, as Lily tended to be the protector. Even with Petunia, when they were younger, Lily had punched a girl who teased Petunia about her long face, and had even defended her to Severus at the start. Severus had hated her defending him, but she had done, both from outright attacks from Potter and his friends, and from the quieter sniping of her friends, little comments about him that Lily had always refuted. To be protected was nice, once in a while, and Lily was moved by their warmth.

After Nigel, a steady stream of people showed up, their names being checked by two house-elves, one named Polly and another, brought over from one of the other homes for the evening, called Posey. She greeted the first few at the door, telling them Jac would be down in a minute, but when her friend returned, having been held up by Nigel asking for an in-depth retelling of the events of the Lake, it still being the best gossip around, she drifted off, keen to avoid having to greet James Potter in front of a crowd of interested eyes, as yet unblurred by alcohol. She went to the kitchen and got herself a drink, without any of the range of alcohols lining the counters. She knew her limits, and didn't like to test them too much, not around so many gossips. Being a small school, Hogwarts was an environment in which everyone knew everyone else, and cared deeply about their private lives. She spotted Rita, a ravenclaw with recently-dyed, obviously itchy platinum blonde hair, who had been speaking to the Hufflepuff Quidditch Captain and trying to disguise scratching her head as playing with a strand of white hair. Lily wouldn't have cared, she didn't really know Rita, who was a year their junior, but she had been spotted and Rita, swirling around, shouted on her.  
"Lily! Lily Evans!" Lily tried to turn and get away before it was rude, but Rita hadn't received a reputation as the school's nosiest (and most annoying) student for nothing. She sensed a story, some gossip to be wheedled out, and she had no intention of allowing her prey to escape. "LILY EVANS!" Her voice was shrill, and she stomped through the crowd, most of whom were simply glad Rita wasn't after them and shrank out of her path. She caught Lily by the arm and, to Lily's confusion and discomfort, pulled her into a hug, which thankfully was brief. "Lily, Oh Lily! I am so sorry, when I heard, I thought, oh, poor you!"  
"What?" Lily was genuinely uncertain. Had someone died, and no one had told her? Had she died? She looked down, but found that she was still solid.  
"About Severus. You must be heartbroken."  
"What?" Lily repeated, aware of how unintelligent she must sound, but it didn't make sense. Surely the gossip-worthy part of the story was that Lily had been asked out by Potter, and had knocked him back, though that wouldn't be enough to stop people thinking she fancied him, most of the school seemed to think that it was a given that if you were attracted to boys, you were in love with James Potter. Even Robert Polski, the Ravenclaw captain had admitted that he was a little bit in love with Potter after seeing him pull off some fantastic manoeuvres in the final game. Despite the fact that it had meant his team, and house, had lost, he had conceded through tears, that Potter was amazing.  
Surely Rita should be asking for the inside scoop on why Lily, deeply in love with school heartthrob, James Potter, had turned him down so cruelly, and publicly. Why would she ask about Severus? That part of the story was more personal, and less publicly interesting. It was almost as if Rita was a person, not a gossip-detector.  
"Well, that business at the Lake, calling you a-" she tailed off, but raised her eyebrows and waved her hand, Lily nodded, to confirm her memory, and Rita went on. "I just don't understand how he could be so cruel. Do you know what people, not me, but some people are saying that the confrontation at the Lake was just the tip of the iceberg, that it was the culmination of months of resentment, in which Severus Snape, hurt at your ending the relationship in favour of James Potter, decided to publicly distance himself from you?" she looked intensely at Lily, trying to gauge a reaction, no doubt.  
"It wasn't Severus who started it" Lily explained testily, noticing as she spoke how she still, after all the trouble, defended Severus first. "James- Potter was picking on him, I don't know why, because he can and he thinks that it's funny, and I went over to stop it, and..." this time it was she who tailed off. How could she explain the next events. Potter's cocky comments, asking her out and embarrassing her, Severus's words. She hadn't forgiven Severus, how could she?, but James had bullied him, mercilessly, and she knew how proud Severus was, how he hated weakness and never wanted to be seen as weak, and while she couldn't understand or forgive his use of that word and the change it showed in him, she understood, to an extent, why he had exploded, and why he hadn't wanted to seem like he needed her defence. Still, she had been cruel to James, and rude and, as her father would have put it, a bully of bullies is still a bully. Just because someone was rude, it didn't give you the right to be rude, you should rise above it, be better than them. James was a bully, but he wasn't evil, he had a lot of good qualities and she understood how, for those not on the receiving end of his cruelty, he could seem wonderful. It was hard for her to reconcile the boy who bullied Snape with the one who would stand up for his friends against a group of larger, heavier Slytherins in first year, and who sheepishly accepted the Quidditch trophy from the then-captain in third year, when he had scored more goals than the slytherin chaser opposing him had scored all season. He wasn't a bad person and he had forced Lily to realise that there was more grey involved in humans than there was either black or white. So, she wanted to protect Severus, but couldn't forgive him and she wanted to condemn James, but couldn't hate him. It was all so...blurry. Lily didn't like blurry, she liked clear lines and boundaries. She realised then that Rita was still there, staring at her, and that she had been silent for some time.  
"Severus and I aren't friends, we were never in a relationship, and I am most certainly not in a relationship with James Potter, either then or now! If I was, why would I have shouted at him, told him I'd rather go out with the Giant Squid?"  
"Well..." she said, looking slyly at Lily. "I didn't say any of this, so I can't speak for anyone else... but, I would imagine they would argue that it was a way of deflecting attention, publicly deny it so that people wouldn't talk about it, and I suppose you could say that none of your insults were really meant."  
"Not meant? I meant every word. He does look stupid, he does do that irritating thing with his hair, he is arrogant, and he is a prat."  
"Did you call him a prat, I don't remember that!" she looked as if she wanted to consult the record, if she was a lawyer, Lil would have betted the court reporter would have been reading back her tirade against Potter, as it was Lily shrugged.  
"Dunno, probably. It's true anyway, and I'm saying it now." She started to move towards the door. "Look, Rita, I don't know, or really care, what people are saying, but I know I was rude to Potter and I have every intention of apologising for my delivery, but I don't think that any of the gossip they're looking for is here, I'm just not that interesting."  
Slipping through the door, she breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be rid of the vulture, Rita. Sure that her words would soon be dissected by everyone even vaguely connected in the school, she reviewed her words, sure that no one would be deluded enough to think that there would be a Potter-Evans relationship anytime before Hell froze over. She walked around for a while, saying a few hellos and stopping occasionally to chat to a few people. For the most part, people seemed to steer clear of any Snape or Potter related comments, but it couldn't have lasted. Karen had come over, touched Lily's arm and pulled her to one side.  
"James is here." Lily, who had been engaged in conversation with Robert Polski, and who hadn't been particularly willing to leave it, stopped looking over her shoulder at him and looked questioningly at Karen.  
"That's... nice?" Not exactly sure why Karen was telling her, she hadn't confided her worries about seeing Potter.  
"Nigel's here too. And look, there's Alice too. It's almost as if there's a party nearby."

"Lily! You don't have to pretend not to be nervous. I'd be a bit worried too, given that you screamed at the boy the last time you saw him, not your greatest moment."

"Oh, shut up! I got angry, and he irritated me, and I was embarrassed, but I apologised... in a way." She was suddenly less certain that Potter would get the message of apology in her tone. Surely it was obvious, but things were never straightforward with Potter.

In any case, Karen seemed to understand that Lily wasn't really willing to talk about it.

This happened several times, about every fifteen minutes, when Karen came over to wherever Lily was and updated her on evrey mention that had been made of her by anyone at the party, and exactly what she had heard them say. It got a bit tiring and Lily was starting to see that in some cases, it was possible for protection to feel a lot like suffocation.

Lily constructed a list of the people she had to avoid at this party, and it seemed to grow a lot smaller.

1: James Potter - obvious.

2: Sirius Black - Potter's best friend, likely hates me, will tell me so, obviously avoid.

3: Peter Pettigrew - as above, not likely to attack me, but will make me feel even more guilty, so avoid

4 - Remus Lupin - not as bad as Sirius or Peter, but will be with Potter, so avoid anyway

5 - Rita Skeeter - obvious, is a mental case, avoid

6 - Nigel Forester - mental sanity reasons, is irritating, also might talk about Severus

7 - Robert Polski - avoid at least until he forgets about seeing me trip over that chair (Karen's fault)

8 - Karen Coleridge - killing me with kindness, irritating, also pushed me over a chair, so possible physical safety issues.

Reviewing this list, it became clear that she ought to hide. It really was the most grown-up, sensible way to deal with this. It would be rude to stand around and ignore the people when they saw her. It was definitely the mature thing to do to sneak into the kitchen, though ducking behind a kissing couple at the sound of Sirius Black's voice might not have been a great example.

When she reached the kitchen, she looked around, and seeing no one overly familiar, she started to pour some water out, but stopped herself. There was a bottle on the counter, among several others, that found its way into her hand. She found out from the large swig she took, and the burning sensation that followed, that it was firewhiskey. She pushed herself up onto the counter and drank. After every slug, she debated returning to the party, but she was sitting on the counter for a long time, smiling casually at the partygoers who came in seeking drinks, but refusing to relinquish her grip on the bottle that she was claiming as hers.

"I don't know if that's a great idea, Evans, drinking alone is a bad sign, y'know."

She looked up, dreading seeing James Potter, but she was relieved. It was Thaddeus Moore, the Ravenclaw prefect. He was half-smirking at her, a lopsided smile showing his amusement, presumably at her. She shrugged, not sure what to say, it hadn't been a great night. Then she offered the bottle to him. She expected him to laugh her offer off, collect some drinks and leave, but she was surprised when he took it. They passed the bottle back and forth for a while, silently, looking like the kind of people that Petunia might have crossed the street to avoid. Lily smiled gently at the idea. If Petunia wasn't her sister, she would avoid Lily, but Lily had always tried to avoid that truth. Maybe Petunia liked normal, and Lily wasn't that, but they were sisters. The truth was they were sisters in name only, and Petunia, with Vernon's help, seemed desperate to change that final similarity. Still, that was a thought for another day.

She had to say something, the silence was something that might not have bothered Lily if she had been either completely sober or a lot drunker, but as it was, she didn't like it, it wasn't comfortable.

"D'you like Quidditch?" She groaned internally, but he answered as if it wasn't a painfully awkward question.

"Yeah, I don't play, but I love the game, I'm a Pride of Portree fan. What about you, do you play?"

"Yeah, a bit. Y'know, with friends. You should ask Jac to tell you the story about the apple tree, she loves that one! But I'm a Harpies fan." He smiled, the all-woman Harpies team were one of the best in the league, but their fans were often rabidly defensive of their team. Thaddeus, she remembered he was often called Ted, which suited him better, asked her about the most recent match and they talked for a while, amicably, about the new signings made by Pride of Portree and how they would fare against the tried and tested experience of the Harpies. Lily had signed herself up for a range of wizarding magazines, from gossip to sport, as well as the Daily Prophet, to keep her connected to the wizarding world during her time at home. Magazines, even with their moving covers, were preferable for Petunia to actual witches turning up at the shop.

Eventually, as it did whenever members of two houses met, talk turned to the House Quidditch teams. Ted begrudgingly accepted that Gryffindor had been a better team than Ravenclaw last year, but he defended the Slytherin tactics throughout the season, which had involved several off-pitch incidents, various attacks on the Gryffindor players and a brutally rough final match, with one Gryffindor player knocked clean off their broom. Lily abhorred their approach and had been one of the many calling for the disqualification of the team, and she argued violently now against their being permitted to play the final game. As the firewhiskey took effect, the volume increased, and they were almost shouting and laughing, arguing with one another.

"But how can you defend, no, just listen- How can you say that what Norrings did to Atkins was okay, was in any way acceptable. He should have been suspended from school, not just Quidditch!"

"But you can't let off-pitch stuff affect the game, everyone knows that those two have been at war for years, it's not connected to the game!"

"Of course it is! You think the Quidditch doesn't impact anything outside? That's so wrong! Norrings knew that Atkins was important to the Gryffindor team, and it was absolutely deliberate!"

It seemed that the alcohol had made her forget what had driven her into the kitchen. She was laughing uproariously when the door swung open and someone stumbled in.

"Oh, sorry! Didn't realise this room was-" the voice, familiar through Lily's slight haze, took on a slight edge and she looked round to see Sirius Black. "Oh. It's you." He had made no attempt to disguise the outright dislike in his voice. If Potter had forgiven her, and was over her outburst, his friend certainly wasn't.

He grabbed the nearest bottle and stalked back out, never once looking Lily in the eye, not even seeming to see her.

She was a bit unsettled, but the alcohol had made any feeling hard to cling onto for too long, and the worry slipped away.


	6. Stubborn Little Witch

Eventually, people's drinks ran dry and the kitchen stopped being a safe haven. Hopping off the bar, she told Ted that she needed to go find her friend, and he waved her off good-naturedly. She circulated a little, looking for Jac, suspecting that she might be occupied somehow. She turned a corner in a long corridor that ran from the kitchen to the back of the house, and heard voices, barely more than whispers, through what was a fairly poorly lit corridor.

"It's just a bit close, that's all. I never feel great the days before it. I just feel a bit tired, that's all."

"Aw, come on! Don't go! It's barely midnight, Moony."

The echoes that the hall gave the voices distorted them and made them hard to hear clearly. She didn't know anyone called Moony, there was a Catherine Mundy in second year, but she was (a) a girl, when both were male, and (b) a second year, who would certainly not have made it through the security charms.

It seemed Moony, whoever he was, wanted to leave, and was being badgered about it by the other.

"Look, I'm going to go. You can all stay. Prongs is having a good time, I think, and Wormtail, he'll stay. I just want to go, I don't like being around people at this time..."

"Oh, thanks a lot."

"Not you lot, you idiot, you know that. Anyway, you're not exactly... well, you know. I just don't like being around groups, it's as if I feel more like, more like it than me. I'm going."

The other voice conceded, not happy about the decision, but the two walked off, leaving Lily unsure of what she had just heard. It sounded like Moony wasn't human, he was speaking about people as if he wasn't one of them. With a nickname like Moony, it wasn't a great leap to imagine that he might be a werewolf. A werewolf among the Hogwarts students. Immediately, Lily's mind flew back to a period in her first year at Hogwarts where, after having consumed every Nancy Drew book she could get her hands on, she had investigated everything and everyone she knew, searching for a clue. She wasn't a natural investigator though and she had been forced to give it up by demand of her roommates after she 'deduced' that Lynn had eaten the last of Jac's chocolate and caused a massive falling out, until the chocolate was found, ten minutes after Lynn had burst into tears and ran out the room. Lily had felt terrible and apologised for weeks, going so far as to buy Lynn a bar of Honeyduke's finest, though it only served to remind her of the incident in the end. The thought of a werewolf reminded her of something else, a theory she had listened to, out of a determination to save a friendship, which she had dismissed out of hand because, how could it be true. She didn't like thinking about that, she preferred the Nancy Drew memory. Twelve year old Lily would have snuck after the two voices, tried to see their faces, and sixteen year old Lily was close to doing the same when she was interrupted by a voice behind her, this time very much aware of her presence.

"Evans! What are you doing out here? Bit creepy for you, isn't this, lurking in corridors?" Potter looked amused, and Lily blushed slightly. She couldn't exactly be annoyed at him for butting in on her, when she had been eavesdropping on someone else. She was trying to think of an excuse as to why she might be standing, silently, in the middle of an unlit corridor, but nothing was forthcoming. In the end, it was he who filled the silence.

"Enjoying the party?" there was something about his voice that seemed almost...nervous. No, that couldn't be right, nervousness was not in Potter's repertoire. More likely, it was a slight uncertainty about how she would react. Seeing the self-assured, arrogant Quidditch Chaser looking unsure of himself was enough to make her smile.

"Yeah, it's okay. Not too sure where anyone is though..." she was aware of a slight fogginess, the result of firewhiskey no doubt, but she ignored it as best she could. "I've been avoiding you." As the words came out, a slight worry gnawed at Lily. She wasn't supposed to say that, was she?

"What? Why?" He seemed genuinely confused by this. Lily smiled. So he had understood the apology in her tone. Triumphantly, she beamed at him.

"Tell Karen."

"What?" James said, his brow furrowed deeply, as if she was speaking a foreign language, one that he almost understood, or used to understand, but not quite.

"Tell Karen... I mean, you have to tell her that you understood." Seeing that he wasn't getting it, she clarified. "She thought that you wouldn't get the tone. The _tone." _ She gestured with one hand, for emphasis, as he smiled wider, though whether it was from amusement or understanding, she couldn't have said. "She thought that you wouldn't see that the tone of the letter, was apologetic. I apologised with the tone."

"Apologised for?" James asked, speaking to her like to a small child who needed prompting to keep talking and not wander off and start twirling.

"Apologised for the shouting, and the rudeness. And the thing with the hair." She put one hand to her head and ruffled her fringe, in a broad imitation of Potter's habit. "The whole thing was mean, though I don't disagree with myself, that is, I do think you're arrogant, and self-centred, and full of it, and bigheaded. You're a prat, Potter, and I don't like you one bit." Somehow, through the course of explaining the apology, she had gotten annoyed again. She shouldn't have to apologise to him, he was a bully, and he was cruel and cocky and just horrible. It was a self-fuelling fire and she needed nothing from the nearby, slightly stunned Potter to work herself into another fury.

"I shouldn't have written you a letter. We're not friends. I was trying to apologise for the way I said those things, because a bully who bullies bullies is still a bully. And that's bullying, or something. I'm not sorry for the things I said, just the-"

"tone?" he filled in. He still had a smirk on his face, but it was soured, he seemed not amused, but annoyed. "God, Evans, don't you hold anything back! Funny thing is though, I might be arrogant, but at least I'm happy. I've got friends and any number of people who think I'm a good person. What've you got? A few girls who you only deigned to be friends with once Snape had humiliated you, you ask anyone here who they like better and it'll be me, except maybe dear Nigel."

"You think that because you've convinced some people that you're entertaining, that makes you a good person? Well, it doesn't. Even if everyone hated me, which they probably do because I dared to insult Saint Potter, I'd still be ten times better than you, because I don't pick on people, I don't torment and humiliate people who never did anything to you, for fun. You're a bully, James Potter and I've never seen one single thing that tells me that you're anything other than absolutely horrible!"

"Have you ever really looked? And for God's sake, Evans, 'never did anything', you can't be that oblivious. Did Snape really have you wound that tightly round his finger? Did you ever bother to think that dear old Snivelly might not have told you the complete truth, that maybe you only got one side of the story? No, I don't suppose that occurred to you because it's only Potter, what could he have to say? And you should look who you're calling arrogant, Evans, I'm not the one who thinks that their opinion is the stone cold truth. You really are such a...cow!"

She could have punched him, and he looked ready to burst. She had to get out of there. Slightly stumbling, she pushed past him and towards the light of the room on the other side. She knew everyone must have heard and when she fell into the room, they made no attempt to hide it. Rita who seemed to have had her ear pressed against the door, was incandescent with glee, her eyes shining with the promise of gossip to spread. Lily didn't even care about that, she just wanted to leave, and never see Potter again.

She realised halfway down the Prewett driveway that she could do neither of those things as she was miles from home, with no transport until tomorrow afternoon, and she attended a small boarding school with Potter. She stopped on the stone path, not wanting to go back inside, not wanting the eyes to be on her, but unable to leave. She was revolving slowly on the spot, when she saw that she was observed by a figure on the grass, a few feet away. Not immediately obvious in the gloom beyond the shine of lights from the house, the outline moved towards her and became a fully-formed person. One she had hoped not to see. Only marginally better than James Potter, Sirius Black stepped out of the shade.

"Jesus, Evans, what's with the twirling? Practicing for the ballet?"

"Oh, go away!" She moaned desperately, aware of the fact that her eyes were reddening and starting to sting in the way that meant tears were soon to follow.

"Why, does the primadonna prefer to practice in private? Are you scared I'm going to steal your moves. No need to worry, I don't think they're my style." He seemed remarkably different to his earlier attitude. He had been downright cold earlier, now he seemed almost friendly, though still retaining the mocking tone that was almost required in a conversation with Sirius Black.

"Just, leave me alone... please!" she pleaded, mortified to hear her voice break and becoming aware, seemingly at the same second as he did, that she was seconds away from tears.

"What's going on?"

"Ask your friend. Go ask Potter, and just, leave me alone!" She pulled her wand from the pocket in her dress, and Sirius backed away, almost tripping over himself as he staggered backwards before raising his hands in surrender and walking away. Part of it must have been the drink that he had consumed, but Lily felt more powerful to see that there had been a genuine wariness in his eyes, he knew she could and would use her wand.

She waited, trying to estimate how long it might take before she could pass unnoticed through the drunken guests, She was hoping against hope that the fight might fade into the haze of an evening forgotten for many people present. She knew they would remember. It was as she was cursing the teetotal Rita Skeeter that her eye was drawn to the skyline. An orange light burst out from the blackness of the hills, separated from the inky sky by only a slight difference, and stars. Something was on fire, something was exploding. A beat later, the orange and yellow, just as Lily realised it was fire, changed, its colour becoming tinged, smoke billowed up, the grey looking stark against the black sky, and the flames became green. Lily opened her mouth to scream, to shout for help, knowing that green flames were not natural, and that the fire, whatever it was consuming, was deliberate. The blaze had been sighted by others in the house, and people, perhaps those standing in the hall were shouting to those further in, because people were rushing out, tripping over one another.

"What is it?"

"Oh, it's too cold out here-"

"What's going on?"

"Is something on fire?"

"Has someone been hurt?"

The questions grew louder, but all Lily could think was about the fire. That was fiendfyre. She turned to ask, but Jac was at her shoulder, apparently sobered by the fear.

"What's over there?"

"It's...Oh my God, it's a village, it's the village. Do you think... You-Know-Who?" Terror was in her eyes and her voice, and it doubled when her gaze fell to Lily's hand, where her wand was.

"You don't think they'll come here? Do you?"

"Dunno, Jac, I just don't know. Where's the boundary of the charms your parents put up?"

"It's up to the end of the trees, the orchard, and down following the stream, why?"

Lily heard her, but didn't answer, she had already taken off running outwards, towards the trees. She knew that the boundary put up by a witch and wizard with magic far beyond one future-NEWT student, but she needed to test it, to know that it still stood, that they were protected. She ran, faster and faster, whipping past trees and feeling the thin branches snapping at her arms. She could hear a few sets of footsteps behind her, but her mind was on the boundary, not on those behind her. Reaching the end of the orchard, she stumbled to a halt and felt a hand close on her arm, and a voice shouting, at her.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" James Potter shouted, a different kind of anger in his eyes. He had been followed in his pursuit of her by Sirius Black, Alice Elgin and Karen. All of whom were displaying slightly different manifestations of the same emotions; fear at the threat of attack, shock at the violence of James, and annoyance at Lily's running into danger.

"Get off me!" She yelled, refusing to be treated like a child, she pushed him away sharply, and pointed her wand at him. "Look, we don't have time for this, just shut up!"

He did. She didn't know what it was that had calmed him, but he backed off and she was able to turn and start moving slowly outwards, gingerly testing the ground with each foot, waiting for the tingling feeling that would grow as she approached the boundary. Her wand stretched out in front of her, her eyes probed the darkness and the silence was complete, almost heavy on her ears. It was a few moments before she felt it, a strange relief, the force field, the thickness of air that, though invisible, was proof that they were still protected, still safe.

Lily was about to turn back, fighting her urge to try and breach the boundary, to get to the suffering souls in the fire. She knew there was no magic she knew that could help, but it seemed wrong to cower safely, when they needed help. She was caught in another twirling moment of guilt when a rustling dragged her attention back to the present situation. Beyond the orchard there was a short clearing, then a wild forest grew up. From it, something, or someone was advancing. Lily wasn't sure whether the boundary concealed her from view, or simply blocked access, it depended on the exact nature of the spell used, but Lily didn't want to surrender an advantage she might have, and gestured to the others to be quiet. The first figure emerged, as if growing from the trees themselves.

A large, heavy-set man with protruding eyes and a missing leg limped out, wand extended. Lily recognised him vaguely, probably she had seen him in the Daily Prophet, but she couldn't identify him for certain as either a Ministry worker, or another sort. She kept her wand raised, knowing that the boundary could be brought down any second, and preparing herself to fire off a curse. She kept her foot a little too close to the boundary, knowing that if the tingling feeling ceased, it would signal the boundary was down. The man, growing clearer as he illuminated the scene with his wand, had one eye covered in a bandage that looked in need of changing, but he had a demeanour of control.

"Think this is it?" a voice, too young to belong to the one-eyed man, whispered.

"I think you ought to shut your mouth!" That was the older man,

Behind her, Potter sighed with what sounded like relief.

"That's Moody!"

"Oh! Well, something big must be happening then!" That was Sirius.

Lily couldn't believe they could be so stupid. She turned round and was about to curse them into oblivion, when the older man spoke again.

"Would that be Potter in there?" He squinted at them, and Lily knew he could see them, the boundary wasn't shielding them from view. "And not just Potter, there's Black, and Miss Elgin too." By this point the two men had approached the boundary, and a second later, the pain in Lily's foot stopped. Lily's wand was still raised, she wasn't willing to lower her guard for two strangers on the word of James Potter.

Seeing her pointing her wand, 'Moody' addressed her.

"Do you think you stand a chance here, girl? What're you, a Weasley?"

She fixed him with a direct gaze, determined that if this was her last moments, they would not be spent pleading.

"An Evans, as it goes, and I might not win, but I'll fight."

The reaction to this was as varied as they were extreme. Sirius barked a laugh, Alice shook her head, and James looked genuinely scared. The young man with the old wizard looked from her to him, unsure of what was going to happen. James stepped forward, and put himself between Lily and the old wizard, facing her.

"Potter, back off!" she warned, keeping her wand aimed at the intruders.

"Evans, don't be stupid, this is Alastor Moody, the auror."

That sounded familiar, the name, but there were ways to look like an auror, without being one.

"Prove it!" she challenged, and the colour drained out of James's face.

"Lily..." his voice was weak, was he scared?

"I said prove it!" she directed this to 'Alastor Moody', whose scarred face was hard to read, but if Lily had to guess, she would have thought perhaps he looked a little impressed. James looked pleadingly to the older man.

"She's not... She doesn't know you, she..."

A long pause followed. Then the man spoke.

"That's alright, Potter. You could take a few lessons from Evans - was it? - here. I don't know how long I've been telling people, what we need is constant vigilance. Never let your guard down. Alright, Miss Evans, since you don't know me, how would you have me prove my identity?"

She thought about it, never lowering her wand.

"Potter, you know him?" she asked, not actually looking at him, the drama of the night not having erased completely the embarrassment of earlier. He nodded.

"Right, okay, you think of a question that only the two of you would know, something you know that an imposter couldn't, and you tell me what the answer is, and if he answers right, I'll lower my wand."

Moody smirked. "You know I could just disarm you, and save us time."

"You know I could just curse you. I've got a wand pointed at your head. Go on and try to get to your wand before I stun you. If you like."

Something about her attitude seemed to please him and he nodded James to comply.

"Okay... What did you eat for dinner the last time you came to my parents' house? That okay?"

Lily nodded, eyes focussed away from Potter. He closed in and whispered in her ear, and seconds later, Moody announced a menu of onion soup, beef and lemon mousse ('I didn't eat that, though, not sure if that counts')

Satisfied as she could be, she slowly, cautiously, lowered her wand, and Moody gave her a curt nod before taking off towards the house.

The teenagers were all frozen for a minute, until Alice broke the calm.

"Bloody hell, Lily! Threatening to curse Moody, you're lucky you've still got all your limbs!"

Everyone laughed, that kind of nervous laughter that infects everyone.

""You know I could just curse you"...Brilliant, Evans, didn't know you had it in you!" Sirius seemed thrilled at the whole situation.

"I can't believe you did that." Potter said, quietly. In the silence that followed, he gently touched her arm, a tentative brush that would have seemed comforting, and relieved to someone who wasn't as complex a muddle of anger, hurt, humiliation and guilt as Lily Evans. Shrugging his hand away, she turned on him.

"Do me a favour, Potter, just stay away from me! If you fancy getting yourself killed because you're too arrogant to think someone might attack you, don't drag me down with you. If you ever try and stop me doing anything ever again, I won't need a wand to hurt you!"

She stormed off, furious and not quite able to breathe properly. When she reached the house, it was to see that many adults, aurors and parents had arrived, drawn by the news, though how it had spread so wide, so fast was beyond Lily. She was tackled into a hug by Jac, who was crying.

"Lily Evans! Don't you dare... ever... do that again!"

She thought about explaining, but she was so tired and she didn't want to talk. The whole night had been exhausting, for one reason or another, and all she wanted was to sleep. Jac, refusing to let Lily be apparated home by an auror until the pre-arranged time the next day, was quick to oblige, and soon, Lily was lying in a cool, clean bed, and sleep was drifting into the edges of her mind, she couldn't wait to not feel as bad as she did. As her thoughts became less lucid, she opened her mouth and asked her friends, with the kind of candour that some people only ever achieve on the edge of sleep, or in the depths of drunkenness.

"Are you only my friend because Snape humiliated me?"

"No, Lily. We're your friends because we like you. You've got a lot of problems, Evans, but popularity isn't one of them."

"Hmmm..." She twisted, trying to get comfortable, and her friends sighed contentedly, ready to sleep. She had forgotten to mention the fight.

"Karen?"

"What?" She sounded a little irritated, but that couldn't be right.

"You were right, the tone was not understood."

"Potter?" she mumbled, almost incoherent through her pillow

"Yeah. He didn't think I had to apologise. I tried to explain, but I ended up shouting at him again. It's becoming a bit of a routine with us."

She was talking to herself, she realised. Lily looked over and saw that both Jac and Karen were asleep. She turned over, and closed her aching eyes, and tried not to think. She wanted nothing more than to fall asleep. It didn't work. She couldn't stop thinking, but then, did she ever?


	7. Ain't she dull?

Normally, I don't like to add in notes, but I just want to apologise to anyone who has been reading for the delay in posting, no excuses, just been a bit blocked.

Hope you like it, let me know?

The next day bore the full story of the fiendfyre. Jac, insensible and not having a great head for directions at the best of times, had gotten it wrong. It was a village, but it was only one building that was consumed, and no one was hurt, miraculously. The impact was more mental than physical, as it was clear that it had been an attack, perhaps a practice for something bigger, and it had been done by supporters of Voldemort.

Thanks to Jac's parents being connected to the Ministry, the three girls, Jac, Karen and Lily, were escorted to Diagon Alley by an auror, and their return arranged by floo. Lily would floo with Karen and be apparated home from there but they were allowed a few hours to spend Jac's birthday money. Determined to sweeten the sourness on which the evening had ended, Jac started by demanding they let her pay for three large ice creams, which they ate while walking around. When Lily stopped outside the quidditch supply shop, she noticed Ted inside, but didn't have time to say hello before Jac dragged her off to get a second opinion on her newest dress robes.

Ted saw her and they waved awkwardly at one another, as Lily was forced away. Jac noticed, but said nothing until she was in the robes shop. Standing on a pedestal, having cloth pinned onto her, she broached the subject with her usual subtlety.

"So, d'you fancy Ted Moore?"

"What?" Lily laughed, feeling a little uncomfortable discussing it with an old woman flitting around them, her measuring tape twirling independently through the air. She had demanded on measuring Lily up for robes, declaring there was a new fabric that was made for Lily's colouring, and started measuring, despite Lily's protestations.

"I saw you, with your little wave."

"Oh, so that's how you know, but by that logic I'm also in love with Karen because we once held hands during apparition."

"Hey, I wouldn't judge you!" Lily smiled gently, ignoring her friend. Jac was not the sort to be ignored.

"I heard you were very 'cosy' at the party!"

"What?" Lily questioned. "Who told you that?"

"I have my sources!"

"The house-elf?"

"Yeah."

"Knew it!"

"You don't deny the 'cosiness' then?" Jac's eyes took on an almost Rita-ish glint.

"We talked about Quidditch, and drank some firewhiskey. We're not exactly setting a date!"

"But, there's something going on!"

Lily denied it, and continued to do so as the process of measuring them went on. Lily refused the robes, she didn't have the money and moreover, she didn't need dress robes, her friends weren't exactly the 'dinner party' age, and Hogwarts wasn't likely to throw a ball anytime soon.

She tried to pretend she didn't see Jac slip the woman money, but she began to work out exactly how much she could save up to pay Jac back for a set of robes she didn't want. The three girls stepped out into the stifling heat of Diagon Alley, the summer seemed to be asserting itself in its dying days, making its fading presence known before the leaves started to fall and the air grew colder. Only a few more days until King's Cross and the Hogwarts Express and a return to the place where Lily felt most at home.

Surprisingly, the days from when she left Jac's house to the first of September went in very fast. Between packing, sending off some more letters to people discussing the incidents of the party and sending out even more letters denying things that people had heard about the party, she barely had enough time to annoy Petunia before she was forcing her trunk into her dad's old, beaten up car. The journey was pleasant enough, Lily was always happy in her father's company and the journey was smooth, aside from one brief stop where he had laughed so hard that he had to pull the car over and have a coughing fit, choking on one of the toffees that were tradition on their car journey to the station. She managed to stagger with her trunk over to the trolley station and was soon walking through the familiar Muggle train station towards the magical barrier between platforms 9 and 10. She said a warm goodbye to her father, hugging him and feeling her eyes stinging slightly at the thought of him being all alone in the shop, Petunia was barely at home, though perhaps she would be more frequently with Lily gone. He wouldn't like to see her upset, so she hid it, blinking rapidly to disperse the tears before they were really formed. Taking the trolley from him, and with a final kiss on his cheek, she wheeled round and faced the barrier, the featureless stone wall that would disappear as she reached it... hopefully. She looked down to the cage that held Meredith, who was looking up questioningly at her owner.

"Right then, back we go! Are you ready?"

The bird didn't answer.

She pushed the trolley, gathering speed as she reached the wall, and passed right through, her eyes squeezing shut at the moment of impact and opening a second later to a whole different scene. There was a train, a great red one, a large brass plaque on its front declaring it the Hogwarts Express, but there was something indefinable about the scene that marked it as magical, as different. It might have been the great number of owls being pushed on trolleys, or the swishing robes and pointed hats in place of more mundane attire, but there was something special here. Lily took a moment to stare, the scene was worth admiring. Parents were hugging their children, trying to ensure that nothing was left behind or lost. Lily looked around for her friends, but couldn't see them in the crowd and so started to push her trolley to the train, and surrendered it among the large piles of similar trunks that were stacked up on the train. Carrying Meredith's cage in front of her she scanned past every face in each carriage and when she found her friends, she dropped the owl off and then, after a brief chat, headed towards the front of the train, to where the prefects would meet to receive their schedules and whatever over-eager, pompous students had been chosen as Head Boy and Girl would give a speech, which they would try to make sound different from the year before.

She must have been early because there were only three occupants in the prefect's carriage. The two new prefects from Hufflepuff were there, Ruby Jones, a fellow Slug Club member, though she was more enthusiastic, and a boy whose name escaped her, she knew it was either Jeffrey or Joseph, maybe.

The third was Arnold Casters, a seventh year who Lily could see was the new Head Boy. He was a good choice, very bright and rule-abiding, but perhaps a little dull. Lily supposed that was a good thing for a Head Boy, and as she looked at the two Hufflepuffs, who she was only sure were alive because they kept blinking, Lily wondered if that was the common factor in prefects, did Dumbledore pick dull people? She knew she stuck to the rules, as much as anyone else did, but she never really thought of herself as dull. Perhaps it was the contrast to Petunia who was positively proud of being boring, but Lily had always considered herself slightly dangerous, a bit exciting.

Now that she thought about it though, when was the last time she had done anything even remotely risky, or interesting?

She supposed that running off the night of the fire was risky, but that was a serious situation, she meant something fun, something that wasn't an instinctual reaction. She was clawing for something interesting about her when she heard her name.

"Psst, Lily! Oi!" Jac was tapping the window gently, waving for Lily to come over. "Are you going to want anything from the trolley?"

"No, I've brought-"

"toffees, I know." Damn, Lily thought. She was so predictable, so dull, that her friend even knew what sweets she brought on the train journey.

"Jac?" she asked, not sure whether asking if you were boring was a dull thing to do. "Am I dull?"

"What? No!" Jac said, but her voice had that slightly dreamy note that showed she wasn't paying attention.

"Oh my God! I am, aren't I? Why didn't anyone tell me?"

It wasn't Jac who answered. A voice behind her crowed.

"Hmm, why didn't anyone tell Evans that she was boring, I wonder, could it be that she's completely incapable of taking criticism?"

She might have expected James Potter to be present in her moment of self-doubt. He seemed to have a radar for it, a Lily Evans insecurity detector.

"Oh, leave it alone, Potter. I seem to remember you starting to yell at me when I called you a bully, so I'm not the only one who can't take criticism, you're just as bad as I am!"

Another voice, Sirius Black, snorted at that and chipped in quietly.

"As bad as one another? It's like you're a perfect match!"

Lily had the strange feeling that everyone around her found something highly amusing, except James Potter, who was staring her down with an intense dislike.

"No, that can't be right because he's so self-obsessed that if I was anything like Potter here, he'd be madly in love with me!"

"No fear on that front, Evans. If I was even half as smug as you, I'd throw myself off a bridge."

"Well, we'd better find a bridge, because you're ten times more smug than I am. Smug? Can't you hear yourself, you're a hypocrite."

"As least I'm not boring."

Lily stomped into the prefect's carriage and slammed the door in his face, the drama of the gesture somewhat ruined by the glass panel that she had to pull a blind down to block, and further destroyed by Remus Lupin knocking to come in about five seconds later. Lily sat down and refused to look either at Remus or towards the door, where she could hear Jac talking, though what she was saying was not clear. She prayed that the meeting would be quick and she could sneak unnoticed into her friends compartment. No one listened because the meeting dragged on for ages and it was growing dark before Lily was able to leave. She had sat next to Lupin, but hadn't even looked at him for more than a second at a time.

The new Head Girl was Amy Cheung, a good choice and Lily's preferred option. A Hufflepuff with a knack for divination but a surprisingly grounded personality for someone with an interest in the woolly subject. She was always very thoughtful, and though Lily didn't know her particularly well, the two had always had a good working relationship.

Still, it seemed that between them they were determined to ensure that all the prefects were well-versed in each and every Hogwarts school rule, which took an age. That, combined with a number of over-enthusiastic fifth years, meant that Lily spent the majority of the meeting pinching her leg to keep alert.

She would normally chat to Remus, or even pass a few notes to him, but she couldn't. it seemed that James Potter had stepped up from just doing things that might annoy her to actively trying to antagonise her. He had no reason to be so rude, he was the reason her best friend had... well, it wasn't a clear cut situation, but if it hadn't been for him... there was no point in over thinking it, he was horrible.

Remus seemed to accept that she wasn't really willing to talk to him, and they walked in silence until Remus found his friends. Lily refused to even glance inside, she just kept walking. She also passed a carriage of Slytherins and had to check herself when she noticed that she was looking for Severus. She couldn't see him, but she hadn't exactly hung around. It was a relief to get to her carriage, and she threw herself down next to Karen, wagging her fingers at Meredith, who had been settled onto a chair, still in her cage.

"So?" she asked Jac, a little surprised that her friend hadn't immediately started talking about what she had said to Potter after she had stormed away. Strangely, Jac seemed reluctant.

"What? How was the prefect meeting, who can we expect to be seeing have a breakdown mid-October?"

"Amy's Head Girl, and Arnold, as expected I suppose." She thought about three years ago, when Myra Sanderson had had a meltdown in the Great Hall over prefects not being thorough enough on their patrols. It had been quite a sight, and had ended with her taking three weeks in the Hospital Wing to recover. It had become tradition since then to take guesses on whether the Heads would last the year, and there was even a running bet, with quite a sum of money to the one who guessed closest to the day of the meltdown.

"Amy'll be fine, she'll be able to see all the disasters coming! Arnold might be a better bet for the breakdown."

Jac wasn't talented at avoiding talking about things, and Lily only needed to raise an eyebrow at her before she broke.

"Look, I know what you want to know, but I'm not going to tell you."

"What?"

"You want to know what I said to James. I'm not telling you."

"Why not? You're my friend, not James bloody Potter's!"

"Can't I be both?" She seemed so casual, genuinely unconcerned about the fact that she was fraternising with the enemy.

"No!" Lily nearly shouted. "He's so horrible to me, and he's so arrogant, why would you want to be his friend?"

Jac shrugged, and pulled a newspaper from her bag, unfolding it carefully and raising it in front of her face.

"Is it because I'm boring?"

A cackle came from behind the paper. "Lily, you are a lot of things, you're a pain, and you're a human guilt trip, you're impatient, and you're altogether too concerned with other people, but you're not boring. Why did you think you were? Is it because James said you were, because James also once said I was part-goblin, it doesn't make it true!"

"It has absolutely nothing to do with him. I was just thinking that Arnold's quite sedate, and the two Hufflepuff fifth years are almost comatose, and I wondered if Dumbledore picks boring people for prefect, and then I tried to remember the last time I had done something interesting, or fun, or immature, or reckless. And I couldn't." She nodded her head in resolution. "I'm going to be more fun."

"Right then!" Karen said, a laugh in her voice. This was not the kind of amusement Lily hoped to inspire in her future as a fun person, They were both clearly laughing at her, they didn't think she could change. She absolutely could, though, and she was going to.

"So, what's on Fun Lily's agenda for this term, can we expect some wonderful prank to rival your nemesises, nemisi? Sirius Black and, gasp, James Potter?"

"I said I was going to be fun, not idiotic. I just mean that I'm going to do things rather than complain. I'm not going to be as... dull as before."

"So? What are you going to do?"

"I... Maybe I'll... Dunno!" she slumped against the seat, being fun was exhausting. She looked at Jac. "You're fun, aren't you? I mean, people think you're fun, people like you!"

"People like you too, you're good."

"What d'you mean, 'good'?"

"Y'know, you're just...good. You stand up for people, you're so kind, unbelievably kind, you're selfless, and people just, they just like you."

"Yeah, but I'm not fun."

"I think you're fun!" Karen piped up, and Lily couldn't help but laugh. When she stopped, she knew what was at the root of the problem.

"It's just that things have been so serious for so long, with Petunia, and Severus, and now Potter, I feel like my life is just a series of me making people who used to care about me, hate me. I just want life, everything to be fun, I mean, for goodness sake, we go to magic school!"

Karen looked sympathetic, a little pity in her eyes, and she nodded along, a kindly smile on her face. Jac didn't say anything either, but from the look on her face, for the few seconds before she raised the paper back up, was understanding.

Nothing much happened for the next few hours, they read the paper in turns, and shared some sweets from the trolley (the toffees stayed uneaten in her bag).

They changed into their Hogwarts robes when they started to see the familiar countryside pass by the window. The journey took most of the day, and having only eaten sweets, Lily was already dreaming of the food that would soon fill the great hall. She climbed off the carriage and there was a rush of students towards the row of carriages that waited. She thought that she ought not to push through the crowd, it was a prefect's responsibility to keep the other students in order and safe, but it was also very dull.

She let a few people go but when she made it to the carriages, most were gone, or full and about to go. She groaned loudly as she noticed the choices in the remaining carriages. There was one seat in a carriage with a group of Ravenclaws that included Rita Skeeter, or two in a carriage of Slytherins, whether Severus was one of them or not, she couldn't have said, it was not an option. The third choice was when Lily realised that there might have been a God, but he certainly wasn't a big fan of Lily Evans. James Potter and his three friends were lounging in the last carriage. She whined for a moment, but her stomach grumbled and she knew that walking up to the castle wasn't an option. Jac and Karen seemed to be frozen, waiting for their orders, and with a final sigh, she put a hand on both their backs and forced them forward. More out of a lack of other choices than a positive decision in one direction, she sent her two friends ahead of her, into the carriage with the Gryffindors.

For a second, she thought that one of them might tell her to get off, that she wasn't welcome, but they simply looked in her direction for a moment, and then continued their conversation. She looked pleadingly at Jac, begging her wordlessly to start talking about something. She obliged, striking up a loud conversation about her most recent musical discovery. She was a Muggle music fan, and found it almost as amusing as Lily found wizard music, though Lily still had an affection for certain Muggle music. She noticed that the boys' eyes darted towards them more than a few times as the horseless carriage trundled up the path, but she refused to acknowledge them, she absolutely was not going to get dragged into another fight with Potter.


	8. Lucky Girl, Lucky Boy

"That just shows you how blind you are to anything that isn't within your tiny little sphere of James Potter world. you can't even see how ridiculous you seem!"

"Well, neither can anyone else but you, I'm not exactly hated, how can you be so idiotic as to think that you're the only one capable of seeing the real version of me. You think you're so clever, and I've managed to fool everyone else. Never for a second would you even consider that it might be you that's in the wrong!"

"It's perfectly possible to fool a lot of people, for a long time. I can't wait for the day when they realise how horrible you are though, maybe some time after that, you might start to be able to see yourself, as the arrogant prat you are, with an over-inflated ego!"

There was a silence, that scared her more than the shouting. It had taken ten minutes for her to snap. They were still in the carriage, still trundling up the road, and people in the surrounding carriages were craning their necks in a very Petunia-like manner to see the latest instalment in what had escalated from casual sniping between the two popular students to an all out war.

Potter seemed to have been struck dumb, and, as usual, Lily immediately felt the guilt start to build. It was one of the things she hated most. She obviously hated losing an argument, or not getting the last word, but whenever someone else was beaten, she felt guilty and always wondered if she had gone too far. Even with Potter, it seemed she was not imunne to feeling bad. He seemed to have realised something, and she thought over what she had said, it was one of the more gentle insults, she didn't think it was that bad, she hadn't insulted his quidditch skills after all.

A painful silence fell, and the carriage continued. It was one of Lily's favourite moments when the carriage turned a corner and instead of the monotonous view of trees, she got the first, truly magical glimpse of the school, lit up against the night sky, sparkling and casting its light over the inky black lake. She smiled, in spite of herself, forgetting for a second all the anger and discomfort, just looking up at the beautiful castle that lay ahead. None of the occupants of the carriage spoke the rest of the journey, Lily and James had made it too awkward. Lily hated that, she didn't want to dislike Potter, it would have been so much easier to just ignore him, but she couldn't, there was something infectious in the air around him, that made her furious. She didn't understand how she could have started several conversations with the intention of apologising, but ended up in a screaming match.

They had never been close, she had always had a somewhat negative view of him because of his treatment of her best friend, so theoretically, the breaking up of the friendship should have destroyed her one reason for hating him. If anything, it had intensified it. It seemed that the feeling was mutual, he certainly didn't like her, which confused her. Outside of Petunia, she wasn't used to being genuinely disliked based on her own personality. Some Slytherins disliked her for the family she came from, being muggleborn, but she didn't know how to deal with being disliked. She knew that not everyone loved her but in general she was a pretty inoffensive person, people didn't really tend to have a strong negative reaction to her.

Potter obviously did.

She wondered why, if he disliked her so much, he had asked her out. She knew he had just being playing up to the crowd, hoping that she would react poorly, but it seemed a strange thing to do with a girl he didn't like. What would he have done if she had said yes, she mused. Not that she ever would have done that.

When they finally got off the carriage, Lily was relieved to find that the four boys were sitting far away from any spaces and she was able to fall into a chair next to Mary McDonald, a seventh year who was chatting animatedly to Dory Crockford about something. The two greeted Lily warmly, and moved up to make more room for the new arrivals. Lily didn't know anyone in the new incoming first year, but it was still nice to watch the sorting. She played a game where she tried to guess the house of each new student. When the final child was declared a Ravenclaw, and Dumbledore had announced that there was still a list of banned items that could, as always, be viewed in Mr. Filch's office, the food appeared. It was moments like this, faint with hunger, that Lily truly appreciated how great magic was. She piled more food than was polite onto the gold plate before her, and started to eat. She was halfway done when she looked up and saw Adi, watching her and laughing, unable to eat.

"Watch yourself, Lily, remember to breathe between mouthfuls, yeah?"

"Breathing second right now, food's first!" she chewed, but it was hard to continue eating while laughing and talking.

"What, have you not eaten since June?"

"Not this well, food at Hogwarts isn't exactly comparable to the stuff at home."

"Still, we're here all year, you will get another chance to eat, I promise."

She slowed down after that, only taking one more slice of bread and refusing the majority of the desserts, being tempted only by the chocolate cake that was too good to think about leaving uneaten. She was surprised when she managed to stand up at the end of the feast, and she had to take a few deep breaths before calling on the first years to follow her as the meal ended. Remus Lupin found his way to her side and they walked, trailing the tiny children behind them. Halfway up one of the many staircases on the way to Gryffindor Tower, she almost whispered.

"I'm sorry about earlier."

"You didn't do anything to me to be sorry for."

"I made the carriage journey really awkward."

Remus shrugged, he was always so polite, he could rarely be goaded into giving an opinion.

"You weren't arguing with yourself, James gets you annoyed, and you him."

She couldn't really say why she spoke, but she did.

"Why does he hate me?"

To his credit, Remus didn't look shocked, or much of any emotion really. He hid whatever he thought well.

"He doesn't hate you, Lily. No one could hate you, you're too-"

"inoffensive?" Lily tried.

"Good. You're very good."

"So, I'm dull."

"No, not dull, even James doesn't think that." Lily didn't want to hear Remus's backtracking.

"Well, if he doesn't think it, he shouldn't say it. I'm sick of people lying to me, or saying things that aren't true because they think it's better, or easier, or whatever."

Remus said nothing, and Lily waved the first years to keep up and quickened her pace. With the stress of the day and her fight with Potter, all she wanted was to go to bed, sleep and wake up to a busy day full of NEWT classes that would keep her too busy to think about anything currently plaguing her mind.

She did her duty, showed the first years around the Tower and warned them about the girls staircase not letting boys in, and then, so tired that she couldn't quite remember actually doing anything, she fell into her bed, not even pulling her curtains shut. She was practically asleep before her eyes closed, and was lost to the world until the morning.

"Charms, Potions, Transfiguration, Defence Against the Dark Arts and Herbology. What about you?"

"I'm doing Divination instead of Transfiguration, but the same otherwise." Karen responded, she had been worrying the whole morning that Slughorn would not let her into Potions with an E, even though the professor had clearly stated he would accept A grades. Karen was the sort who liked to have something to worry about, so though Lily had reassured her about her grades, it was kindest just to let her fret and listen to her stream of thought.

Jac would be taking Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, Charms and Divination, having scrapped the grades in enough subjects. She had chosen not to continue Defence against the Dark Arts against the advice of her parents, but she refused, complaining that four NEWTs was more than enough work, in full anticipation of a howler from her mother, trying to shame her into reconsidering.

Having had her subjects approved immediately, Lily finished her toast and jam breakfast and darted out of the Great Hall, having just seen Potter and Pettigrew stroll in, and not wanting to be around them longer than necessary.

First was Defence, which was always exciting because each year Lily had been here had yielded a different DADA teacher. She was the first student to make it to the room on her timetable and she settled herself into a good seat near the front. She pulled the thick, new book from her bag and was setting up her stuff, parchment and quill ready, as other students trickled in. Jac and Karen came in together, but, after a whispered conversation, they split and Karen sat with Lily, where Jac settled herself in right at the back. Even the traditionally late four, Potter, Black, Lupin and Pettigrew were present before the teacher. He was a tall man, in his late fifties perhaps and though he was very thin, there was something like Slughorn in his attire, a deep plum velvet waistcoat that might have been borrowed from the Potions teacher if it weren't half the size as anything he might have fit into. The man had dark, slicked back hair and a severe face.

"I'm Professor Darroch, and this is Defence Against the Dark Arts, NEWT level. You are all advanced students, and I will expect a level of decorum fitting your status as such. In this class we will examine the various threats to the magical community and how best to deal with them, in theory and practice. You will be expected to demonstrate abilities in casting a range of defensive, and in some cases, counter-offensive spells, as well as a deep understanding of the moral and magical implications of the spells used. In order to fight what we might term 'darkness', we must understand its forms."

Karen looked impressed, this was a far more intense beginning than they had experienced the year before, when their teacher, Professor Warder had slept through the first class and taught most days half-drunk. It seemed like this year might teach them more. He immediately asked them to stand up, which boded well and the students all exchanged excited looks at the prospect of getting to use proper spells.

"Now, the most important weapon in any duel is...?" He looked around questioningly.

"A wand." A Ravenclaw called out.

"A gun!" Sirius yelled, to mostly blank looks.

"A shield?" Lily asked, more to Karen than as a general answer.

"Yes!" The professor pointed at her, and waved her forward. "Say it again, Miss...?"

"A shield, and it's Evans. Lily Evans."

"Evans?" He looked thoughtful, but said nothing more on it and continued. " Ten points to? Gryffindor. I assume you can cast a shield charm competently?" He asked the class. Most nodded, but Jac and a few others looked slightly shifty.

"Right, we'll practice that today first. I'll need pairs." Everyone clutched their friend, and turned around to sort out groups. "Not your friends, you're rarely going to need to duel your best friend."

He rummaged in his briefcase, before bringing out a list of parchment.

"Right, alphabetical order, I suppose is best."

Unfortunately, the surname Evans was close to Forester, so Lily was paired with Nigel. Part of her liked the idea of being able to fire curses at him, it was a good, legal way to vent her anger, but also, it did mean that she had to talk to him.

"Hullo Lily!" He announced pompously, flourishing his wand unneccesarily as they waited for the command to begin. "Bit of a disaster at the party, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, but at least the fire wasn't in someone's house, no one was hurt, thank God!"

"No, I meant about you and James Potter, heard there was a bit of a blow-up between you, nothing too bad I hope?"

She shrugged and murmured non-commitally. Potter was right behind her, and she didn't want him to think that any argument between them had impacted on her in any way. "Dunno, I suppose, all the arguments kind of blend into one after a while. I don't think it was particularly important."

She heard a sharp sigh behind her and almost turned round to see whether he was listening, but instead she tossed her hair back, hoping he was close enough to be hit by it and raised her wand.

"Okay, choose an attacker, and begin. Remember only disarming spells!"

Lily looked it Nigel, thinking it would probably be rude to demand to attack him first. He spoke first.

"So, attack or defend?"

"I don't mind."

"Okay, you defend."

She prepared herself, elbow loose, feet apart, arm extended but not locked in place. There was a rumble of shouts, 'Expelliarmus' and 'Protego' bounced around the cavernous classroom, its high ceiling magnifying the cacophony.

Lily was quick enough, her shield flew up, a pale blue blur cutting the air, the only sign that magic had been performed. Nigel's spell rebounded off it, and fired safely away. Others hadn't been so lucky, many were now hunting around for their wand, having felt it pulled out of their hand. She dared a look round and spotted that James's spell had worked as well as hers, he had been shielded from Peter's attack and the spell had even bounded back and seemed to have almost hit Peter, if the way Potter was apologising and Sirius explaining what had happened to Remus through tears of laughter was any indication.

The hour passed quickly, Lily had managed to disarm Nigel twice, but her shield had worked every time. She was feeling quite proud of herself and had left the classroom with a smile on her face when her bag flew off her shoulder, skidding down the corridor and spilling her books everywhere. Realising it had been a spell, she turned around and was faced by James Potter. Before he could speak, she rounded on him.

"Well, I shouldn't be surprised. I suppose that's how Potter does things, first it's the arguments, then you just go straight for physical attacks. Can I expect you to start levitating me upside down next? You're pathetic.""

She tried her best to gather her things, pulling books into her bag and then stalked off down the corridor. In none of this did Lily notice James's face which was not defensive, but shocked, and Severus Snape's wand, which was quickly lowered as the class dispersed.

It was often the way of things that when you spent a long time looking forward to something, it went by far too fast when it came. That was the case with Lily, as her classes of the first day seemed to blur together. It was as if she had left the DADA classroom and had stepped through time until the last class of the day. She walked into Potions dreading the hour ahead of her. Potions had always been her favourite class, and part of that had been working with Severus. That was not an option now. She walked in to see the bench at which she had spent five years of lessons, next to her best friend, and saw that he was there, in his usual seat. Karen and Jacqueline made up for every irritating moment of 'protecting her', they each took one side of her and steered her to the table that they had always used. Jac set Lily up in her seat before walking over to Snape and sitting down beside him. He looked round, but his face became soured when he saw her. It had obviously been a big statement to sit in his old seat, and not remain cloistered with the other Slytherins, and it had been for nothing. Lily refused to look, she would only feel guiltier than she currently did.

If Slughorn noticed the breakup of the long-standing Potions partnership, he didn't mention it. He simply started by lifting the lids off four pots, and inviting guesses as to their contents. As usual Lily and Severus shared the answering of questions, though nothing else as Lily resolutely refused to glance in his direction, even when he spoke in response to Slughorn. The potions were each more difficult than the last, ending in a tiny phial of gold that could only be Felix Felicis, which was the source of great interest.

"So, turn to page 76, and I want you to make an attempt at the potion, the Draught of Living Death that you find instructions for there. The winner will receive this," he unscrewed the little bottle and took a sniff, evidently it was pleasant, "A bottle of..." he looked around for an answer, and pointed at Lily, whose hand had immediately raised.

"Felix Felicis, or lucky potion."

"Right you are, Lily! Felix Felicis, good luck, liquid luck! That's a fine prize, and won't be given out easily."

The class was almost buzzing with excitement, the prize seemed to have inspired even those who were not natural potion makers, those who were in the class thanks to hard work, or some of the luck that they so desired.

She set a fire immediately under her cauldron, and began to work. She almost missed the companionship, the sense of working together that Severus had provided. Karen was lovely, and fun, but she never got as excited as Lily did about finding an improvement to the regulated instructions, she never suggested a change, or wanted to experiment with the ingredients. She wasn't the natural that he had been, but she also didn't support a group of people who wanted to see everyone like Lily wiped off the face of the earth.

Though not as fun as Potions had been before, she found some of her old excitement. Severus had been inventive because she had the knack, he was willing to trust her instincts, and she had been surprised to find that she had a knack for a skill that wasn't really inbuilt. Some subjects, the ones with spells, were easier if your magic was strong, but others, like Potions ought to be equal. Yet, not everyone appreciated the skill of brewing potions, and some even viewed it as lesser because it didn't require as obvious a display of magic.

Slughorn walked around, examining their potions, and stopped at Lily's, a bright smile on his face as he declared it flawless. She was proud of herself, the draught had been tricky, but a few modifications had yielded an excellent result. She was handed the few notes she had made, small changes, across to Karen, but there was something so temperamental about potion-making, as if the cauldron could sense that you weren't sure what you were doing.

As the cauldrons bubbled, Lily was handed the small bottle of Felix Felicis, and while most people gave a polite round of applause, she saw that neither Severus Snape nor James Potter showed any recognition. She tucked the bottle into her pocket, wanting to keep it safe, knowing that it could come in very handy, and that it would be very fun, and not at all boring or dull, to use liquid luck.

Dinner was a decidedly more sedate affair than the feast had been, whereas last night had been a celebration, this night it was simply a meal, every person in the hall had been exhausted by the day of classes. There was something about the atmosphere at the section of the Gryffindor table where most of the sixth years were gathered. Lily knew that Potter wasn't the sort to apologise, and so if she wanted the awkwardness to go away, she had to make the first step. She needed to have a serious talk, and then they could go back to being acquaintances, who didn't like one another, but who didn't hate one another either. She needed to fix the problem, and then she could start being fun.

It wasn't really a great idea to do it at dinner, so she ate in silence, but waited until everyone had left the Great Hall, and had mostly retreated to their common rooms and dormitories. The four boys were taking up the best spots, comfy, plush chairs next to the fire. She told Jac, Beth and Mary MacDonald about her plan, Karen having being occupied on a 'walk' around the castle, that had required a great deal of time spent on her make-up.

The three gryffindor girls were not as enthusiastic about Lily's plan to end hostilities as she had hoped they might be. Jac asked her if she had a death wish, and Mary just shook her head and looked nervously at Sirius Black, perhaps the most likely to hex someone who annoyed him of the group.

She was determined though, even if no one else could feel the tension, she hated walking about the castle knowing that there was someone who hated her. Whatever Lupin said, you weren't as rude to someone as James had been to her unless there was a genuine dislike there.

Pushing her tired body out of the plush armchair, she made her way over to the circle where her enemy sat. He didn't even look at her when she was standing over him, which already irritated Lily but she pushed the feeling away, determined to be the bigger person.

"Potter?" she asked, trying to sound confident and nonchalant, but coming across far more timid than she would have like. She could almost feel all the eyes on her, thinking that she would be screaming at him in a few moments, bracing their ears for the onslaught. She wasn't going to do that. Not this time. He said nothing, but his eyes shifted to her, and he raised his eyebrows in question.

Deciding that was as close to civil as she was going to get, she pressed on.

"Can I talk to you?"

"I'm sure you can!" he smirked, and she was reminded of her grandfather, who had been an English professor and had always smugly corrected Lily on her grammar and sometimes even on her accent. The memory was so strong that she smiled in spite of herself, which seemed to throw Potter off, as he pushed himself up in his chair and looked right at her. "What d'you want?"

It wasn't exactly friendly chat, but it was better than they had been in a while. She didn't want to say all the things she thought she ought to say in front of the entire population of the common room.

"I just want to talk to you, are you busy?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"On what you want to talk about." He looked almost sulky, like a child, trying to figure out if he should expect another row. "I don't think my poor, bruised ego could survive another vicious Evans attack!" He fell back in his chair and threw a hand over his face in mock-woe.

She wished he would just be a normal person, and not make everything so difficult. As she felt the now-familiar irritation building, she tried again, more directly.

"Please, I just want to speak to you alone. Please?" she braced herself for some sniping comment, or insult, but nothing came. He forced himself out of the chair, and followed wordlessly as she walked, half-stunned, to the portrait hole that led out to the winding staircase. She climbed through and stumbled slightly, catching her foot on the corner, but she felt a hand on her arm, helping her through. She made a note of that. Positive things about James Potter. She would need to start a list, for when he was being an irritation, to remind herself why everyone else seemed to love him.

Number 1: He didn't let me fall on my face, even though he hates me.


	9. Relapse, Realisation and Rethinking

Sorry, I feel a bit rude writing at the start of the story but I just want to thank everyone who is reading this. I've been writing for so long, but never have I been confident enough to show it to anyone and every view, every review and every favourite/alert is boosting my ego immeasurably. So thanks, and I encourage you to review if you have an issue with the characterisation or anything, because I'm trying to get better and could do with advice, and I also could talk about these losers and my ideas about them for months on end. So, thanks again. Please keep reading and let me know what you think!

"So..." He tucked his hands in his pockets, they had stood without talking for a few moments, while Lily tried to remember how to start an apology. She didn't often apologise outright, she didn't really do stuff that needed a proper, spoken apology. "What did you want to say? Because if you've really pulled me out here to tell me that you think I'm a prat, please understand that I know that by now!"

"You know you're a prat?"

"I know that you think I'm a prat, big difference."

"Hmm..." she tailed off, not wanting to tell him he was a prat.

"Is that what this is about? I don't want another shouting match." He seemed... tired. Suddenly, the guilt she had felt about the initial blow-up came back. In between then and now, she had been able to stifle the guilt with irritation, but there was no hiding from it now, as she looked at the boy in front of her. He had never seemed less confident, nor more human. He seemed in some way to be almost resigned to the fact that another fight as in the offing.

"Why do you hate me?" she asked, worried that she would start another fight, but she had to ask. She needed to know.

He looked a bit shocked. "I don't-"

"Oh, don't start that! You don't call someone boring, and smug if you like them!"

"I do, don't know about you. Remus is boring, and Sirius is smug, and I like both of them. I can like you and think you're annoying." he reasoned, then, because he was James Potter and he couldn't be altogether nice, he added. "Which you are!"

"Thanks!" she tried to keep a straight face, but continued. "Listen, I don't want to fight, it's making life difficult and I know I can be a bit boring, and a bit annoying, I know that, but you need to be-"

"Less of a prat?" he asked, an attempt at a casual tone fell flat.

"Look, I'm sorry about everything I said, it doesn't matter that you annoyed me, I had no right to say those things and it was rude of me. I shouldn't have called you arrogant, or big-headed, or pompous, or full of yourself. That wasn't my place and it wasn't right."

He seemed a bit shocked with her approach and there was no immediate Potter retort, he just nodded acceptingly. She felt a bit awkward with him just staring at her like she had announced that she thought the Minister of Magic was secretly a Hippogriff. She mumbled a bit. "It's like my dad always says, a bully who bullies bullies-"

"-is still a bully" he finished, and she had a sudden memory of saying the same thing to him, the night of Jac's party. Then, another thing came back.

"Moony!" she muttered, recalling the conversation in the shadows, and she noticed James stunned face change to downright shock. She laughed, he must think she was mad. "Sorry, I just...forgot about that!"

James seemed uneasy still, she must really have shaken him with her apology. She couldn't help but laughing at his startled face.

"You okay, Potter? You're looking a bit like a deer in the headlights."

"Wha-!" he was growing paler by the second, a genuine fear seeming to grow on his face. She tried not to laugh, realising that he must not know the expression, given that he was from a wizarding family that were unlikely to own a car.

She tried to clarify her point, not wanting to leave the conversation with things still unsettled or unclear.

"Look, we've never been friends, but there's really no reason for us to hate one another. I don't like a lot of things about you, but I'm sure you're the same with me? Anyway, we shouldn't have to change, but we can be polite. what d'you think?"

"What don't you like about me?" he said, and his voice was so free of his usual pretence that she almost lied, and pretended she was another member of the Potter fan club, incapable of seeing his faults. Still, she was Lily Evans, and she couldn't do it.

"Well, first, it's just my opinion, you can't love everyone, but you can be a bit full of yourself, and the 'bullying' thing really makes it difficult for me to like you, despite all the good things."

He raised his eyebrows, and she expected him to ask her about his good points, but he focused elsewhere.

"Look, the bullying-"

"Stop! I know that Severus and you were, are, enemies, and I know that he fought you as much as you fought him, but it's hard for me to see you as the victim when you had the whole school cheering for you to torment him, and he had no one."

"He had you. I've heard you yelling, you could compete with the whole school on volume!"

She stifled a small laugh, but quickly returned to seriousness.

"Not everyone in the world is meant to love you, I just don't really know you, and the image you present to the world is one that I don't like. I don't expect you to change it, why would you, but it's just... I dunno, it just is what it is."

"But the thing is, Sirius is just like me, he's smug and full of himself, and probably even worse with Snape than I am, but you ignore him, even act polite, but with me, you treat me like I'm evil."

"I don't mean to. I just..." she wasn't sure that she wanted to go into this. But then she did. "Look, Sirius is who he is, he's charming and cold and cynical, and he's had a tough time with his family, and that makes sense, and that's what he is. You, I dunno, just seem like...more. I don't mean to be rude to Sirius, he's great, but you're not that straightforward. I guess you annoy be because I think you know better."

"Know better?"

She was flushing bright red now. She didn't want to explain this, her thoughts on James Potter, to James Potter.

"I suppose, you just seem like you're a good leader, people love you, they would trust you, and you have a lot of good qualities but you just seem to not care, you don't really act on your good traits. I feel really rude right now." She stopped, not sure what else to say.

"You sort of are." he nodded, but he wasn't being rude, and they smiled good-naturedly.

"Well, tell me what's wrong with me, this is far too one sided."

"No, I wouldn't do that. I'm not a terrible, rude person, y'see."

She whined, and wheedled and eventually, after promising numerous times that she wouldn't be insulted, or start shouting, he started to think.

"Well, you're a bit... y'know, judgmental, you don't really let people explain their side of the story, you just make a decision, and then stick to it, even if the story is completely different. You're not really particularly good at taking criticism, you get annoyed quite easily, but only really with me... I think that's it."

"Really?" She had expected a long list, but the things he had mentioned were more to do with her disliking James, than genuine personality flaws. She judged James too quickly and wouldn't hear his point of view, she always fought back whenever James criticised her, and she flared up without a great deal of provocation from James. She thought about it, perhaps she ought to give the boy a chance. She thanked him for listening to her, and they parted quite amicably.

Number two: He might not be completely awful, as he could have mentioned any number of my serious flaws, but he didn't.

If the first day had been tiring, the week carried on at an even quicker pace. It seemed that teachers were keen to cover the entire NEWT course in the first week, judging by the amount of homework that was piled on them in every class. There were no more Potter bust-ups, the four boys seemed strangely subdued, and Lily would have put it down to the first week stress if it weren't for the fact that they weren't exactly the stressing-over-school sort, and that they kept sending worried glances towards Lily. She thought maybe they were waiting for her to spot something to shout about. The plan for Lily to be more fun had fallen flat, the amount of work wasn't conducive to hilarity. An essay for Flitwick, extra practice from McGonagall, questions to answer for Darroch, it grew steadily heavier towards the end of the week until it was necessary for Lily, and all the other sixth year Gryffindor girls to meet in the Common Room, on Friday night, to help one another through the deluge of work. Lily was rifling through her Charms notes, occasionally ducking out of the way of Jac's misfiring attempts at some spell that she was trying to perform wordlessly. Lynn and Karen were asking one another questions from the large textbooks that they had all bought and not opened over the summer.

The Quidditch team tumbled through the portrait hole, falling on top of one another as they returned from a long practice. The sun had sunk beneath the trees, and Lily felt like she had been studying and writing out passages from the textbook for using in her essay for hours. The seven players were hard to distinguish as Gryffindors from the layers of thick mud that caked their usually red-and-gold uniforms. The looks on all their faces suggested that they were finishing a painfully long practice. The Captain, James, must have decided that long practices, starting from the first week of school, were the way for the reigning champions to keep their title. Having just received the title of Captain over the summer, she could imagine that James would be perhaps overdoing the hard work and dedication, she had done the same at the start of last year as a prefect, trying to prove herself. She was surprised to see that in James though, he didn't seem like the 'proving himself' sort. The Quidditch team split off to go and wash the mud off their faces, Mary McDonald stopped briefly by their table to say hello.

"I think this will be the death of me."

"What? Quidditch?" Lily was surprised, Mary had always been the sporty type and had never complained before.

"No, Quidditch practice, controlled by James Potter. It's interminable. And on top of that, I think I'm going loopy, I keep forgetting things. I'm so tired from practice now, but with NEWTs to study for and the stress of all the stuff in the newspapers, it's no wonder I keep losing things, and getting halfway down corridors and realising I don't know why I'm there."

Mary McDonald, though older than Lily, was the sort of person Lily wanted to keep safe, she was just a lovely person and Lily always worried about her. She had been a target of some bullying last year from a few Slytherins, because she was clever, pretty and muggleborn, and more importantly not ashamed of it. She hadn't ever really spoke about the specifics of the incident, and she spoke very vaguely about it when asked, and quickly changed the subject. Lily never pushed it, but it rankled her that no one had even gotten so much as a detention.

She quickly went upstairs to change and Lily, checking her watch, decided to make a last run to the library, she could finish the Charms homework tonight with the help of one particular book. She climbed through the portrait hole and made her way to the too-familiar doors of the School Library. It was a Friday night, the first Friday of term, so it was deserted, there being a party in the Hufflepuff Common Room (which Jac forced them not to attend on the grounds that it was thrown by Winifred, not Jac's favourite person). She could hear the sound of her heels on the floor, clacking harshly in the dusty quiet.

The Charms section was extensive and Lily had read most of the books in it, but she took a moment to locate the right one, the bright blue and gold volume finally found its way to her hands. She greeted Madame Pince, the librarian, who hated most people but with whom Lily had always got on, she simply cared deeply about the books, and tended to have a soft spot for students, like Lily, who treated them with reverence, and didn't break the book spines.

She had taken about three steps out of the library when she heard a rushing behind her, someone seemed to have followed her out. Knowing who it was before turning, she steeled herself and looked round, refusing to let him follow her down corridors.

"What do you want?" she narrowed her eyes, trying not to see the boy, forcing herself to remember why she hadn't spent the evening in the library with him, shouting internally to remind herself what he had said. She couldn't help seeing the bruise on his cheek, a purple-blue bloom on the sallow skin.

"Was that-?" Even when they were friends, he hadn't liked her mentioning his father, the source of most of Severus's injuries. Lily had always been so angry, every time a new cut or sprain appeared, but those had been the only times he had snapped at her, not wanting to admit the truth, he shook his head now but didn't tell her, as he once might have to shut up.

"No, this is more recent."

Dread filled her stomach. After his father, her suspicions turned where she didn't want them to. Had Potter went straight back to bullying?

"Who did it?" she asked tensely.

"Why do you care?" It was his turn to narrow his eyes, and it hurt her to see the wariness in him, he no longer trusted her to care about him. That confused Lily, whenever she and Severus had fought, small matters mostly, but he had always asked on reconciliation whether she still liked him, whenever they were fighting and Lily spoke, he always assumed that fighting with someone stopped you caring about them. Lily didn't see how that could happen. You couldn't just stop caring about someone, no matter how much you fought. When Lily cared, and she did care for most people, she cared interminably.

She still cared about Severus. She was hurt and angry and she wasn't his friend anymore, but she still wanted him safe and happy and good. She would never stop caring about Severus Snape. He didn't see that.

"I just do." She couldn't explain to him the internal workings of her mind. She didn't even think she could explain it to herself.

"It wasn't the wonderful James Potter, don't worry, you can go on idolising him, you don't have to feel guilty about me!" his voice was so cold, and was so filled with hatred that she was almost a little scared.

"Idolise him? Sorry, where are you getting that from? When have I ever shown the slightest sign of idolising James Potter?"

Her strategy with Severus until now had been to get out of the situation as quickly as possible, but she was so shocked at his claim, and admittedly, she missed him, though not enough to forgive him.

"You've certainly warmed up to him recently."

"I've stopped screaming at him because in the past few weeks, my lungs were breaking down. I've stopped outright fighting with him because it's making life difficult for everyone in Gryffindor. I don't love the boy, I just can't keep hating him as obviously as I did."

"Well, I'm glad that you can just forget about everything he's done, and his friends are just as bad as him. Black's almost as bad, and Pettigrew, he's always whispering plans in their ears, and Lupin-"

"Stop!" she said, surprising herself with the volume. She could let criticisms of the other three fly over her head, though Peter hardly deserved it, but Lupin, Remus Lupin, she had never understood Severus's dislike for the boy. Remus had been the closest of the four to something that Lily might call a friend. They both shared a tendency to spend time in the library, though Remus was far more likely to be researching something for a prank or scheme than a class and a love of the same records, overwhelmingly Muggle music. Snape had hated Lupin immediately, perhaps more than James, though his hatred for James had certainly grown into something of almost epic proportions. She remembered, a few weeks before the DADA exam, when they had been studying in the library, and Snape had aired a theory to her, about Remus's frequent illnesses.

Moony.

She gasped audibly, the realisation hitting her. It made perfect sense and her stomach sunk. Her first thought, 'Oh, poor Remus!', was hurried out of her head when she remembered she was still in front of Severus.

He seemed to have taken her stunned silence as willingness to listen, and dug a book out of his bag.

"Look, you've dismissed it, and I forgot about it over the summer, what with-" he stopped, trying another tack that didn't involve reminding her of the reason they hadn't spoken that summer. "It just seemed unimportant, but coming back, I decided to do some reading, and I got this book. It should explain the signs, and I can see if it makes sense."

The dark red book looked hateful to Lily. It's title, 'The Hidden Dangers of Half-Breeds", stunk of prejudice and one-sided arguments. Having heard on occasion, witches and wizards espousing the ideas that she was lesser for her Muggle blood, it tasted bitter in her mouth, the idea that someone, especially someone as lovely as Remus, could be forced to hide, forced to suffer through the painful transformations, and be judged for it too, for something that you couldn't control. She snatched the book from his hands, and tried to keep the disgust off her face. Opening the book to its first page, she pretended to consider something, then spoke. All she knew was that there was no way Severus could be allowed to confirm his suspicions. She hadn't had time to think it all through, but it didn't require much thinking to see that it Dumbledore didn't know, and Snape told him, or indeed anyone else, Remus wouldn't be allowed to continue in school, and she didn't think that seemed fair.

"Well, it's me you're trying to convince, right? So, I'm not promising anything, but I'll read it, and see what it has to say."

Her heart broke at the hopeful look on his face and the life that seemed to return to the dark eyes. She hated herself for giving him even a glimmer of hope, but if it was between that and saving Remus Lupin's place at Hogwarts, it seemed necessary. She pretended to have forgotten something in the library and ran back, waiting inside until there was no way he could be still outside. Then she proceeded to the Dark Arts section and picked up every book she could see that might tell her anything about werewolves. Next she headed to Care of Magical Creatures, which seemed perhaps slightly insulting to include werewolves in but it was better safe than sorry. Finding two slim books on them, she headed up to the desk, smiling blankly at the confusion on Madame Pince's face, who only let so many books out at once because it was Lily and she could be trusted.

She staggered back to the common room under the weight of so many books, dropped several on the stairs, necessitating a return trip, and was climbing the stairs to the Tower, in sight of the Portrait Hole when she remembered that she was a witch and could have levitated the books.

Cursing herself, she stopped to catch her breath. She didn't want anyone to see the books, but especially not Remus or his friends, she didn't want him to think that she was investigating him. It must be so horrible, she thought, to have to worry about keeping such a secret, being terrified that people would judge you for it if they found out. She was trying to figure out if she could send the books to her dormitory out of the window when two first years clambered out of the Portrait hole, ten minutes before curfew. They both blanched at the sight of the Sixth year prefect, and she thought about taking points away, then had a brainwave.

"Look, you're clearly not just out here to chat to the Fat Lady," and the woman in the portrait sniggered at that, "but I won't take points away if you do me a favour. Go in there, and tell me if you can see Remus Lupin, James Potter, Sirius Black or Peter Pettigrew. She doubted either Sirius or Peter would take an interest in Lily carrying some books, but she didn't want to risk it.

She awaited the two children's return impatiently, her arms aching.

"Nope, none of them are in there."

"Okay, now get inside."

They grumbled a bit, but Lily couldn't just let them wander off at five minutes before curfew, if they were genuinely trying to be back in time for curfew, they wouldn't make it to the bottom of the Tower before they had to turn around. She shuffled them into the Common Room, then climbed in herself, using the levitation that she ought to have started at the Library to make things easier.

She sat down, exhausted on the armchair by the fire, too tired to finish the Charms essay that had led her to the library in the first place. Jac looked over and laughed at the book stack floating next to her head.

"You'll have to get up in a minute! I don't think Sirius will want to share the chair."

"What?" she groaned. "How do you know they'll be coming here?"

"Well, they just went upstairs to get their homework, Lynn and I promised to practice the transfiguration stuff with them."

Lily tried to lever herself out of the chair, panicking. She didn't know where to hide the books. In a flash of poor decision-making when she heard them sprinting down the stairs, she took the top half of the pile and flung it under the sofa, then took the rest and tucked them under the chair she was sitting on.

She threw herself back down, ignoring Jac's amused look, just as the four boys came into the room. It hadn't been her brightest moment, she was sitting uncomfortably and unnaturally stiffly. She was raised up about half a foot higher than she ought to have been. Feeling her face redden, she tried to look sleepy. Maybe they wouldn't bother her if she looked like she was sleeping.

Honestly, she thought they would probably bother her specifically because it looked like she was sleeping.

Sirius sat down in what had been her seat, and started practising locomotion charms, though they hadn't been told by Flitwick to go over that one. He was using the charm to send inanimate objects bouncing off Lily's head. She couldn't have slept through that, so she faked waking up, rubbing her eyes and yawning in what she thought was a very convincing show.

"So, Evans, why exactly were you pretending to be asleep?" Sirius asked, a familiar half-smirk that he must have learned from Potter on his face.

"What?" she mumbled, trying to make her voice croak to keep up the pretence of tiredness. It shouldn't have been a pretence, she really was tired.

He looked at her strangely, as if trying to work something out but then gave up, turning to Beth and actually focusing on the work at hand. The others pulled chairs around and started to work diligently at the list of spells McGonagall had pronounced to have been performed poorly by the class as a whole. Lily ought to have joined in but she couldn't think of a way to stand up without exposing the pile of books she was sitting on. She realised she was going to have to sit there doing nothing until everyone of her classmates had left the common room, and the thought made her want to cry. Karen returned from her 'walk', and settled down in a chair around the table. Her arrival seemed to slow the process of getting homework done, and the study session devolved into them just using whatever they had in their pockets and making the things race around the table.

She tried to sleep, but was drifting off when Jac mentioned her name, obviously thinking that she was already asleep, thanks to Lily's excellent sleep acting.

"So, this is all for Lily's benefit, yes?"

Sirius spoke first. "No idea what you mean, Prewett, we are just very dedicated to our studies this year, so dedicated in fact," Lily couldn't see him but she could detect sarcasm when she heard it, "that we decided not to go to the party in Hufflepuff tonight, Friday night, nor to go to the kitchens and get food, or to go to the Astronomy Tower and get drunk, we decided to stay here and stay sober and practice for transfiguration."

"That's apparently the sort of people we are now." Peter grumbled.

"Responsible and concerned about our future?" Remus asked, his voice wasn't sarcastic, but there was a levity in his tone that suggested he found the whole thing very funny.

Lily didn't know what Jac was talking about, those four couldn't have cared less about her, and under what circumstances was Lily being benefited by having to sit in this stupid, too-warm spot and balance on a stack of books? She wasn't benefitting. Even if she had been studying with them, she wouldn't have gained much from being hit in the head with an inkpot, repeatedly.

"I am very concerned about my future. Concerned that it's going to be spent like this, sitting at a desk, studying. It's a slippery slope you know! One day, you're spending one Friday night studying, the next thing you know you're Head Boy." Sirius whined, and a ripple of laughter echoed round the table.

"I don't think you're in any danger of that happening!" Jac counselled, if anyone could be Head Boy, it's going to be Remus."

"I think Nigel's face might melt if that happens." Peter chuckled.

"All the more reason for Dumbledore to do it. Oh, by the way, any truth in the Skeeter rumour about Nigel and Evans over there?"

Lily almost broke, she hadn't heard that particular rumour but she could have wrung Rita's neck. Her and Nigel? Why was it that there was never a nice rumour about Lily? No one ever asked her if it was true that she had scored the highest mark in Charms, or if she was dating Robert Polski. It was always something she didn't want to be true.

She just managed to keep her face passive and dreamy, but strained her ears to keep listening.

"Nah, Lily might be a bit loopy sometimes, but she's not actually mental, and she'd need to be to go out with that!" Thanks Jac, Lily thought unenthusiastically. Sometimes she wished she had better friends.

"She did write to him over the summer, though. And they spoke at the party. So that would have been enough for Rita to construct some torrid affair, I'm actually surprised there's not a third party involved, a love triangle's more dramatic." There was Karen, bringing some reason to the discussion. Lily genuinely was grateful for that.

"What did she write to him about?" James spoke, for the first time. "I can't imagine what you could say to him that wouldn't lead to a discussion of how wonderful the Hogwarts school rules are."

"I dunno what she said, James, she doesn't actually send me copies of all her correspondence." Karen was laughing, Lily could tell.

"Not about Lily? Okay then!" Jac muttered, laughing as well, before Karen continued.

"Though I have to say, I wish she had, because I'd love to read the letters she sent to you!" Horrible friends, the pair of them, Lily would be better off with Nigel as her best friend, she would never have to deal with this sabotage with a friend like Nigel.

James laughed.

"Did she tell you about the tone?" he asked. Nigel would never have made fun of the tone.

"Ah yes, the tone!"

"What's the tone?" Peter asked them, confused.

Karen and James answered together.

"IT'S THE 'TONE!'" She could almost see them waving their arms in imitations of her. She wished she'd never written to him. The laughter on that one continued for a while.

"Seriously though," Remus asked, "What do you, or what did Lily, mean?"

"She wanted to apologise for being rude to James, y'know, under the tree by the lake. Which, by the way, is ridiculous, she doesn't need to apologise for that. If anything, you should have apologised to her." There was a murmur of agreement from Jac and a few other voices. "So, instead of writing an outright apology, she tried to just be polite to him, and was convinced that she could convey the apology through her 'tone'. Did it work?" Karen asked James.

"I suppose. I know she didn't really need to apologise, we weren't exactly friends before, so it's not like I thought she felt any other way." She felt so guilty at the resigned sound in his voice and wished for the millionth time that she could take back the things she had said by the lake.

"That's what Lily is like though, she's never hated anyone in her whole life, and she can't stand the thought of someone hating her. Not her horrible sister, not Snape, and not you."

"So I'm in a category with her horrible sister, and him? Great."

"No, She just feels the need to make things up to you, because Lily has a guilt problem, she feels guilty about everything. Also, she's not overly fond of talking about things like that, thus the whole 'apology by tone' thing!"

"Hmm, still, she didn't need to apologise. I was a prat to her, and I need to change a bit, be a bit... better."

If Lily hadn't blushed at the lengthy discussion of her tone, she would have at that. The fact that he had remembered her words, that she thought of him as a bit better, was strangely touching. She thought about the fact that James Potter, it seemed, had convinced his friends, three of the biggest troublemakers Hogwarts had ever seen, second perhaps to himself, to stay in the common room and study on Friday night, and was all the more convinced that she had been right. He was a natural leader, and he could use that for something other than causing havoc. She hoped that the small smile that forced its way onto her lips went unseen by the group at the table, but it was certainly noticed by her, and she didn't know how she felt about it.

Number Three: He is a bit better than I thought.


	10. A Reluctantly Charmed Girl

"Lily! Oi! LILY EVANS!" The shout burst through the din of the full corridor of students making their way to classes early on Monday morning and Lily was immediately filled with panic. She thought about running but the source of the shouting was growing closer every second, and it was impossible for Lily to make it to her classroom without being tackled to the ground by the advancing Rita Skeeter. At that precise moment, Robert Polski brushed past her, and smiled apologetically, a sort of 'I-feel-bad-that-you're-about-to-get-tackled-but-I'm-not-going-to-stop-in-case-I-end-up-part-of-the-next-Evans-based-rumour' grin on his face. Lily nodded resignedly and then forced herself to smile, telling herself not to be goaded, and turned to face the girl.

"Sorry Rita! Didn't see you there! What can I do for you?"

"Don't worry!" Rita smiled acidly, knowing that Lily had seen her. Everyone ran from Rita, or everyone who didn't want to end up involved in some rumour or other. Talking to Rita was dangerous, you could 'confirm' a rumour without saying a word. The hallway was busy, but most people were on their way to classes and so didn't stop to watch. A few shot Lily sympathetic looks, those who had been on the receiving end of Rita's inventions before, and kept their heads down.

"Sorry Rita, listen, I'm going to be late, is there something important?"

"Well, I just wanted to let you know about something I heard. I'd never spread a rumour, but I think you ought to know what people are saying, and I couldn't bear it if you were uninformed and someone else had to tell you."

"Mhmm..." Lily nodded along tiredly, wondering who she had looked at for five seconds and so was engaged to be married to, in Rita's world every conversation was a basis for a secret tryst. Usually, it was quite amusing. Rita had once tried to convince everyone that Filch and Madame Pince were in love, and then that Madame Pomfrey, the young matron who ran the Hospital Wing, had broken them up. No one believed it, because they were not morons, but it had provided some entertainment for when Madame Pince had complained loudly about Mr. Filch using a kind of magical cleaner on the floors that made the library smell strongly of lemons, and had brought on many sneezing fits, which could potentially ruin the books.

So, Lily was almost interested in hearing the latest rumour.

Perhaps she was involved in a love triangle, which Karen had advocated and of which Rita was fond, with Potter and Black.

Possibly she had been dating the entire Ravenclaw Quidditch team, in secret.

She nodded Rita on, amused. That soon stopped.

"Forgive him? What on earth is she drinking? Broom polish? She's mental!" Lily hissed furiously in Karen's ear, as they stood around the benches that sat in the centre of the greenhouses in which Herbology was taught. She had managed to keep her face unconcerned when Rita had told her the rumour that she had 'heard' others talking about. Apparently, Lily Evans was an idiot, and had decided to put herself back into the hell that had made up her last two years, by forgiving Severus Snape for being friends with people who wanted her dead and turning on her with the one word she couldn't stand to hear.

She was insulted, the idea that she would so quickly forget the most humiliating moment of her life, that her feelings didn't even exist and that she would just have gotten over the thing that had torn her apart for months, was so unbelievable that she wanted to relegate the rumour to the category in which the Pince-Filch-Pomfrey story belonged. Utter Nonsense.

She had spoken to him outside the library, had pretended to listen to his point, his theory about Lupin. If someone had seen or heard that, perhaps they might have constructed the story, and it was possible they had, Lily hadn't noticed anyone, but she hadn't really looked.

She would rather that people thought she was a weak idiot than find out that Remus Lupin was a werewolf, but still, she really didn't want Severus to hear it, because if he did, he might believe it and she didn't want to have to prove her resolve again. She just wanted him not to be in her life, not the constant, dark presence that he would become if he thought that there was a chance of gaining her forgiveness.

"I mean, can you believe that? Who in their right mind would ever think that I was stupid enough to forget all the stuff that's happened? Really though, who?"

"No one! Really, no one's going to believe it! Everyone in the school knows you're clever, and that you're not going to forget about that. As long as you are not seen skipping down the corridor with Snape any time soon, I think you'll be okay!" she slapped at Lily's shoulder, and a leafy tentacle withdrew, slowly.

"Well then, I'll be sure to limit the skipping!"

"Hopping I should imagine is fine!"

"Where exactly do you stand on frolicking?"

"Unacceptable."

"Strolling."

"Inappropriate."

They giggled, trying to contain their amusement, but James and Peter, who stood across from them, looked up from their attempts to wrestle the Venomous Tentacula that had wound its way up Sirius's arm.

"What's the joke?" James puffed, his face red from effort.

"Tell me, Potter, what are your views on prancing? A step too far, or innocent fun?"

She hadn't expected him to understand, but the shock on his face, the quickly hidden worry, was surprising. She could never gauge how James would react to even the slightest comment.

"What d'you mean?" he coughed, attempting a casual, polite tone.

"Doesn't matter!"

He gave her a very funny, confused look, and then shared a dark, more meaningful glance with Peter, Sirius being occupied with the plant that had made its way to his neck. In the end, Sprout had to cut him free, and the whole class was able to watch in amusement as Sirius begged her to let it strangle him rather than cut a chunk of his hair. The class ended, and Lily had pretty much forgotten the Severus rumour. There was nothing she could do to stop it spreading, and if Severus was dim enough to believe anything that came out of Rita Skeeter's mouth, then that was his problem. She couldn't forgive him, and she refused to try.

After Herbology ended, the last class of the day, Karen ran off to go for a walk. It was perhaps the worst excuse, considering how quickly she sprinted off, no one ran to start a walk. Whoever she was meeting, Karen wasn't ready to tell Lily about it and when Lily had asked the first time, Karen had simply acted as if she couldn't hear, so Lily allowed her the privacy, knowing that she would find out when her friend was ready to talk.

The result of this desperate need for a walk was that Lily ended up returning to the castle alongside the four Gryffindors who had provided so much entertainment in the class. Sirius was rubbing the back of his head, bemoaning the poor hairdressing abilities of Professor Sprout and her unwillingness to simply hack the tentacles off the plant. Peter was consoling Sirius, and turning around every so often to roll his eyes at Sirius's dramatics.

It was a lovely evening, and Lily wasn't ready to go and eat dinner yet, so she said goodbye to the group of students returning from the Greenhouses, and headed down to the Lake. It was still warm enough to sit out, just. She settled herself under her favourite tree by the water and watched the very top of the Whomping Willow, behind the greenhouses, waving its branches lazily in the air, swatting at the brave birds that flew overhead. She pulled a book from her bag and tried to make a start on the Herbology homework that had been assigned ten minutes before. The sun seemed to shine in protest at this, and Lily found it impossible to focus on the drawing of the tentacula roots in her book. She pushed the book to one side, and wriggled down until she was lying on the grass, staring up through the leaves. She picked a daisy that lay at her hand and spun it round in her finger. Concentrating forcefully, as hard as she could on the petals, she willed them to close. Slowly, glacially, the petals curled inwards, only for a second and then fluttered back out. She used to do it all the time, she had shown it to Petunia, the first time she met Severus. It had been easier back then, flowers had twitched at the slightest prompt, now it took focus. She imagined this was a result of learning to focus her magic into a wand, normally the juvenile outbursts of pre-Hogwarts magic went away as control grew. She like this sort of magic though, it felt more physical, more natural, than waving a wand and she liked being able to do it. She spent an hour, picking daisies and setting them to float in the air. When she realised that she needed to hurry back to eat before dinner was over, she jumped and the daisies fell, littering her hair, and her clothes with the flower heads. She brushed the worst of them off her, and tucked her book into her bag before heading back up to the castle.

She threw her bag under the table and climbed onto the bench beside Jac. She started to serve herself some food, and poured some juice from the nearest pitcher.

"Alright, Daisy?"

"It's Lily, remember?" she joked, before picking another flower out of her hair. She had that sort of wavy hair that attracts things like leaves and gets them stuck in it. Between the ages of five and ten, Lily had been almost permanently accompanied by a range of twigs and blades of grass, woven into her hair, much to Petunia's disgust. She chewed quickly, and when she finally looked at her friend, she saw that Jac had a slightly concerned look on her face.

"What's wrong?" she moaned, knowing from the nervous, guilty sort of expression that she wore that something was wrong.

"You're going to kill me!" she whined. "Please don't kill me!"

"What?" her face dropped, and the bread in her mouth became cardboard. She was panicking now. "Jac, what is it? Is it Severus?"

"God no! It's nothing as bad as that. Don't worry. Perhaps it's better, though. You thought it was going to be really bad and now the truth seems like a relief, so maybe now you won't kill me?"

"I'll tell what would make me kill you, if you don't tell me what you've done!"

"Okay, I might have been talking to James, and I might have done something that might, possibly, mildly annoy you. Right, He came back from Herbology and I asked where you were, because I thought you'd come back to the Common Room, but you didn't. Anyway, he was going to leave for Quidditch practice and he was talking about lucky charms, and I said that he had won every match he'd ever played for Gryffindor and so he didn't really need a lucky charm and then he reminded me that he lost that one match, and I said that I hadn't seen that one, because you and I had been in the Hospital Wing with that really weird cold, remember?"

"Jac, not to be rude, but are we homing in on the point to all this anytime soon? I'd really like to know the motive for your murder!"

"Okay, I'm getting there. Anyway, I said we weren't there, so his reputation was intact, and he said that I must be his real lucky charm then, and then I said that I'd missed a few but that the match he lost was the only one you'd ever missed, and now he thinks you're his lucky charm!"

"Right..." Lily said, trying to follow the story. So, James Potter thought she was his lucky charm, right. Well, it was better than Jac having accidentally confirmed when asked by Rita Skeeter that she was in love with Severus. It probably wouldn't come up, and she would just laugh it off if he mentioned it.

It took less than a full day to become annoying. James first mentioned it when Lily was starting her breakfast the next morning, asking her if she felt quite well, as her health dictated their success in the first Quidditch match, which was drawing closer. She laughed.

In transfiguration, James asked her if she might consider attending their practices, because he wanted to be sure he could play well in the mini-games that they played during practice. She had smiled and refused the kind offer to sit on a wooden bench for hours, watching people do sprints on their brooms.

By the time that day ended, everyone in Gryffindor house had bought into the notion that Lily was the main factor in Gryffindor winning, and a huge group of them turned up at dinner to convince her to go to their practice. She agreed to go based on the condition that she didn't actually have to pay attention, and could bring her books and half-written essay along.

As she sat in the stands, which were busier than she had imagined they would be at a Tuesday night practice session. She was sitting next to Sirius Black, who was still grumpy about his missing hair, though he had magically fixed the damage, and kept rubbing his hand over the spot, complaining that it was thinner than before.

"This is intolerable." She murmured, more to herself than anyone else. Every time James so much as moved an inch, everyone would clap and each time he caught the quaffle, or scored a goal, everyone would cheer and look at Lily, giving her thumbs up and patting her on the back.

James seemed to find this highly amusing. She could see even from her distance that he was almost crying with mirth, and his broomstick was shaking with his laughter. Far below, sitting beside Lily, Sirius pushed his feet against the bench in front and shrugged.

"This is Quidditch."

"No, I mean the whole 'lucky charm' thing! There must be hundreds of people who've been to all his matches. You, Peter, Remus to start with." She looked round to where the other two sat behind her, sharing a bag of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans.

"Nah, Remus has missed tons, and Peter usually gets bored and leaves before the end, unless it's a final."

"Well, you then?"

"Nope, sorry! I missed his first match, got hit on the head when Pete and I tried to steal a bludger a few days before, and spent it unconscious in the Hospital Wing. Besides," Sirius's eyes glittered with humour at something, "none of us have the 'prettiest eyes he's ever seen'!'"

Peter kicked the back of Sirius's wooden seat, and looked guiltily upwards at where James hovered. Remus sniffed in mock-hurt.

"Excuse me! I have been told on numerous occasions that I have dazzlingly beautiful eyes. Mine are at least as pretty as Lily's!"

"I'd have said they were better!" Sirius smiled, grabbing the bag of sweets and tossing a few in his mouth at once. "Sorry, Evans, it's just they're a bit... Green, y'know. Slytherin, I've programmed myself to detest everything related to it... Such as my family!"

She shrugged and accepted a red bean from the bag.

"Ugh!" She twisted her face up in shock at the strong flavour. "Peppers! I hoped it was strawberry."

"Nah, strawberry's more pinkish than red. This one maybe?"

Lily tried it and smiled.

"Thanks." She tried to move on from the mention that Sirius had made. Presumably, she was quoting James, and Lily didn't know how to respond to compliments at the best of times, never mind ones from James Potter, especially ones that he didn't intend her to hear. She got most of her compliments from old ladies, and her father. The way she handled it in the end was to ignore it, and eat another jelly bean.

The next week was spent being commended on the Gryffindor Quidditch teams successes in training. Robert Polski, head of the Ravenclaw team, had jokingly pretended to trip her in the corridor, and caught her easily. A chaser from the Slytherin team had less jokingly hexed her with a leg-locking curse at the top of a flight of stairs, but she had shielded it, and docked a large number of points, which made absolutely no impact on the boy. By lunch, James had decided that the 'lucky charm' theory extended to other things when he scored highest in transfiguration and announced that his great feat was thanks to Miss Evans, who had never missed a single one of his transfiguration classes.

"It's touching how dedicated you are to my success, showing up at all my class tests and games, just to cheer me on. Perhaps I should get you to come along the next time I plan a prank, with you by my side, I could probably get away with stealing the Sorting Hat." He commented, catching up with her as the whole Transfiguration class made their way as a group down to the Great Hall.

Something about the way he said that worried her.

"You're not planning on stealing the Sorting Hat, are you?"

There was a gale of laughter from the Gryffindors in the crowd.

"No, of course not, Evans! What would I want with the Hat? I was just giving you an example of the heights I could reach with you by my side!"

"Heights? I think you mean the depths! I don't want anything to do with your pranks!"

He gasped in a fair impression of Nigel at his most horror-stricken, like when he found out that Sirius and James had let that dog loose in the castle.

"I'm shaken, Evans. You'll still be at games though?"

"Mmm" She nodded.

"Then I can rest easy. Say, if you really are my 'lucky charm', I should take you along with me to Hogsmeade." He was walking along beside her, and she was glad he wasn't looking at her.

"I still would rather go with the Giant Squid." She sniped, but there was more humour in the comment than the anger of the last time.

"Oh, sorry, Evans, I meant I should take you along on my date with Helen."

That, Lily hadn't expected, but she recovered from the shock marvellously.

"What? You're going out with Helen? Helen Carr?" she asked, her voice strangely high-pitched, a rush of blood to her face warmed her cheeks, and no doubt turned them red too.

"Yeah. First Hogsmeade visit of the year, only a few weeks away, I can't go alone, that'd just be sad!"

"Right. Yeah, of course. You couldn't have the world thinking that James Potter couldn't get a date!" she laughed, but she thought she must have something stuck in her throat, because it sounded wrong, too loud and high.

"Couldn't have that, what would they say? Anyway, Evans, can you promise me that you'll be at the Quidditch match?"

"I'll try my best."

"That's all I ask!"

Something had soured in the atmosphere. It was just embarrassment, Lily assured herself, she was just embarrassed because she had thought James was asking her out, and he hadn't been. That was all.

She decided she wasn't hungry, and tried to turn and make her way back up the stairs, bumping into a few people as she did so and then coming eye to eye for a split second with Severus Snape. He swept past her, but she was left with the uncertain, vaguely exposed feeling that she had been caught out in some way.

Surely it was a bit early to be organising a date, she mused as she lay on her bed that night. The first Hogsmeade visit was on the 23rd of October and that was more than six weeks away. It seemed a little desperate really to have planned it so early in advance, and more than a little presumptuous to assume that Helen Carr would still be interested in him then. If she had been Helen Carr, she would have said no. If he really wanted to date her, he would have arranged a date sooner, one in the castle at least, though Lily was sure that if James Potter had wanted to get to Hogsmeade before then, he could have.

She put it out of her mind, and focussed her mind on the homework in front of her. She refused to go down to the Common Room, not wanting to be distracted from the high pile of homework that she desperately needed to get through.

The days sped up, Lily spent her time trying desperately to keep up with the continuously growing pile of work that she had to do. Given that they had only to pass class tests this year, not actually sitting the NEWT exam until the end of their next year, most people weren't overly concerned with keeping abreast of work. The days drew on and the winter drew slowly in. Though James Potter might have thought it was sad, Lily did not seek out a date for Hogsmeade. She was asked by Nigel first. He offered to help her in the course of her prefect duties. She told him that she didn't actually have anything to do as a prefect in Hogsmeade.

"Oh, come now! There's always someone seeking to break the rules, ruin it for everyone. The children are a menace, shaking from the Honeyduke's sugar, stocked up with Zonko's stuff, they need controlling. Or we could go for a butterbeer, make sure no one underage is getting firewhiskey, or anything they shouldn't, I've always suspected that Rosmerta to be a bit lax on that front."

"Thanks Nigel, but I'm not even sure I'm going to go. I don't really need anything from the shops, and I could do without the sweets!" she laughed, hoping that was the end of it as she took a seat in the Great Hall.

It wasn't.

"Oh, Lily!" he slapped her on the back, and sent her reeling almost face-first into a bowl of porridge. "You shouldn't be worrying about an extra few sweets. It could be fun?"

She shrugged non-commitally. She could never bear to turn anyone down, except James Potter of course, but that was different.

"How charming of him!" James had overheard the tail end of their conversation, and was smiling. "Nigel's big compliment, 'you're not fat!' Really, you're lucky you're sitting down, Evans, or you'd have swooned!"

She checked that Nigel was out of earshot before turning to respond.

"Well, I don't get a lot of compliments. 'You're not fat' was the best one I've had in months. It certainly beats anything you've ever said to me!"

"Well, I don't need my lucky charm getting full of herself. I need you to be completely sane and sensible and rational."

"And why's that?"

"So that, when you tell me how great and talented I am after the Quidditch match, I'll know it's true."

"I'm pretty sure that you know it's true right now, you don't need me telling you!" She had meant to say that he thought it was true without her saying it, but her phrasing of it had made everyone nearby, Sirius, Peter and Remus, as well as Jac, Beth, Karen, Lynn and several others all look round in surprise. Jac faked falling into a dead faint and had to be held up by Peter and Lynn, whose eyebrows were raised in amusement.

James smiled smugly, something about his smile reminded her of the way that her grandfather used to smile when they both knew that she had said something wrong and he was just itching to pick her up on it.

"You think I'm great and talented?"  
"I think you believe that - Oh, Shut up!" she huffed, and reached across for some toast, embarrassed but also finding the beatific grin on James's face.

She was asked to Hogsmeade two more times by Nigel, and in the end, she agreed that she was going to go, with her friends, but promised to meet him in the Three Broomsticks, the village pub, for a drink. She mentioned the pub by name because she suspected that he might have tried to take her to Madame Puddifoot's, a saccharine little tea shop that seemed to be constructed almost entirely of lace and china, in a thousand shades of pink. There was no way to give the impression of being no more than friends when you were drinking overly-sugared tea in Madame Puddifoot's.


	11. Red Sky at Morning

She and her friends dressed the morning of the Hogsmeade trip, with great excitement. Although Lily had been indifferent when asked by Nigel, it really was a nice treat to walk around the wizarding village, even just looking in the shops was good fun and a worthwhile way to spend a day. She wound her Gryffindor scarf around her neck and gathered her hair into a ponytail, looked at herself in the mirror and then dropped it again. It was wavier than she might have liked, and sat at an annoying length just below her shoulder, still in the process of growing out naturally from an ill-advised short style that she had attempted two years before.

Jac had been ready since five minutes after rolling out of bed and after dragging a grumbling Karen out of sleep, they began to walk down to the Great Hall, to get some breakfast that they could eat on the way to Hogsmeade. They were accompanied on their journey to the village by any number of other early risers, and it was a pleasant, if cold, walk.

They had a few things to do before both Karen and Jac headed off for their dates, and so they started their tour round the shops. Lily bought a few more pots of ink from Scrivenshaft's, and treated herself to a bag of jelly beans, and some strawberry-flavoured Sugar Quills from Hogsmeade.

Jac spent too long debating a new pair of shoes for herself, but was quick to choose a pair of Quidditch gloves for her young cousin's birthday. "He's only six, so it doesn't really matter, it's not like you really remember anything at age six, anyway!"

Karen had misplaced her Potions book and had been borrowing and sharing alternately with every Gryffindor who would let her, a situation which had dissolved into anarchy when she had to share with Lily, who, in a habit she had picked up from Severus, liked to write her changes and observations over the official instructions. Lily had offered to pay for a new book, rather than share again, but Karen refused, and Lily was glad to follow her to the bookshop and help her find the book.

By the time they made it to the Three Broomsticks, Lily's feet ached and her skin was ruddy from the cold air. Jac and Karen left her to go meet their dates. They had agreed to go have a drink with two Ravenclaws, and were meeting them at the tea shop that Lily refused to set foot in.

Lily looked around the busy pub. She thought about going back to the castle, but it was early and she wanted a butterbeer. Thankfully, she saw Alice at the counter. They hadn't spoken much since the night of the party, when she had threatened one of the Ministry's best aurors, in one of her less bright moments.

"Hello, Lily! How's things?" Alice's hair was long and curled softly around her face, and she had a round, kind face that made you immediately at ease.

"Hi Alice! Things are good! How've you been? Is NEWT stress hitting you yet?"

"Not quite yet, I'm expecting it any day now though, the amount of work they give us, even more than last year, if you can believe it, but by the time you get to seventh year, you're kind of used to it. Anyway, what's this I hear about you leading the Quidditch team to victory?"

It took Lily a moment, then she remembered.

"Oh, yes! Haven't you heard? I'm James Potter's lucky charm!"

Alice looked like she was trying to hold in a laugh, settling her face into polite interest.

"Well, I think you make a lovely couple!"

Lily fumed, before realising Alice was teasing her.

"Oh ha ha!" she turned to the waiting barmaid and ordered a drink. "One butterbeer, and... D'you want anything?"

"No, I'm getting them in for our table, come sit with us?"

They paid for their drinks and Lily followed Alice to a table in the far corner of the bar, where she saw Mary McDonald and Dory Crockford, the two other Gryffindor seventh year girls. They greeted her warmly and after a little more teasing about being a 'lucky charm', they settled into what was a common pastime for those who had nothing to do in Hogsmeade, but who didn't want to go sit in the castle while everyone was here, they spied on people.

The other girls focused mainly on their own year group, but occasionally Lily pointed out a sixth year on a date, or trying to get a firewhiskey out of Rosmerta, and the conversation was taken up with discussions of people she knew better.

After about an hour, they were joined again by Jac and Karen, whose date hadn't gone well though neither of them seemed to want to explain why. The rest of the day passed in conversation, and, though she hadn't really been looking, she realised she hadn't spotted James or Helen. They were probably in the tea shop. Lily was getting tired, and she decided just to head back so, saying goodbye to Alice and the others, she trudged back out of the village, refusing to even look in the window of the pink painted shop, not that she could have seen anything through the layer of lace curtain that shrouded the glass.

She made it halfway up to the castle before she noticed that the forlorn shadow that she had hoped was gone had been following her. She stopped in her tracks and spun around.

"What do you want, Severus?"

"Are you okay? I saw you run out of the Three Broomsticks, and I thought-"

"I didn't run out. I left, and even if I had been upset, it's not any of your business."

"I'm...sorry."

"I've heard." There is was again, the ice in her voice, the coldness she didn't know she had.

"Did you read the book?" they were standing beside the greenhouses, and she could hear people moving around it, on their way back to the castle.

"Look, I read it. I still don't agree or care for your opinion."

"How can you-"

She snapped, how could he be so obsessed with someone else's life? If Remus was a werewolf, surely that would convince a person that the species were not dangerous. He seemed so determined to expose the poor boy's secret, when if it were true, it's being discovered would ruin his life.

"Stop it! Just stop! Stay away from me, stay away from Remus Lupin, just stop it! If you don't leave me alone, leave it all alone, I'll hurt you, and I won't just be calling you names, and I won't have to wait for a full moon to do it!" her volume had increased steadily, until she was shouting.

"I knew you'd be defending Potter, but I didn't think that he had made you completely blind. He's dangerous, Lily, they all are, and you'll get hurt if you keep insisting on ignoring it. I suppose that you don't have opinions of your own any more, James Potter's 'lucky charm' can't be allowed to think for herself!"

She was so angry, so frustrated at Severus, her childhood friend, being so cruel. He had never been like this, as far as she had seen, but this was something colder, something new, that she had first seen clearly when he called her 'Mudblood'.

She rushed off, sprinting up to the castle, and not looking back or slowing down from her run until she was safely back in the Gryffindor Common Room. She climbed the stairs and threw her bags on her bed, and started to cry.

She was glad that she had come back alone and that the dormitory was empty because she didn't think she could have explained to someone exactly why she was crying. She sat down on the floor next to her bed, and kept crying for quite a long time. She settled into it after a while and it was quite comforting, to just cry, loudly and ceaselessly.

She couldn't have guessed how long she spent on the floor, but she heard footsteps running up the staircase outside, and Jac and Karen burst in.

"Oh Lily, are you okay?" Karen came over and hugged her, settling in next to Lily on the floor. Jac curled herself up on Lily's bed, and stroked her friends hair comfortingly.

"I'm sorry, Lily. We just found out!"

The two girls said nothing more, they just sat with her. The worst of the crying was over, and she was more embarrassed at her snuffling and sniffing, than genuinely upset about the confrontation.

"What did he say to you? Snape?"

"How did- Nothing new..." she said, realising she couldn't explain about Snape's theory without bringing up the idea that Remus Lupin might be a werewolf, and she absolutely wouldn't do that.

"Oh, Lily, I'm sorry we weren't there."

"It's okay, I don't think he'll try again." She wiped her eyes and, after some gentle coaxing from her friends, she was convinced to go down for dinner with them.

"Potatoes, Lily?" She looked up from her chicken to see Sirius, holding out a dish of roast potatoes at her and smiling brightly.

"Yes, please!" She took the dish and helped herself to a few. "Thanks!"

"You're very welcome. Anything else you'd like?"

"No...I'm okay." She looked at him with suspicion. Sirius was usually only nice to her, or most people, either right before he asked them for something, or right after he'd done something they wouldn't like. She wondered which it was for her. "Are you okay?"

"I'm great, thanks for asking." He didn't look apologetic, in fact, he looked like he was admiring her, like he was proud of her. She wondered if he had heard her crying and felt bad for her, but he didn't seem like the sort to try and comfort people, more like the type to avoid the issue.

He wasn't the only one acting strange. On Monday morning, Peter carried her heavy book bag down to breakfast for her, and gave her some sweets, that he claimed his mother had sent him, but he didn't like. They were her favourite, Strawberry Creams.

James stopped getting her to come to practices, and when he saw that she wasn't managing the day's spell in transfiguration, instead of smugly performing it flawlessly in front of her, or even doing it for her, he offered her help, and even sat with her that evening, going over the theory and wand movements until she got it.

Remus was the closest to normal, if anything he seemed a little more wary and nervous than usual. He helped Lily as always with her prefect duties, and they were friendly, but he seemed to be a little jumpy. Lily felt so bad for him. Part of her wanted to tell him what she knew, but he had obviously at some point had someone else make a massive decision for him, that meant he had to suffer through full moons, and Lily wanted him to feel as safe as possible. He might never be secure, or feel completely safe, but Lily didn't want to take away from him his right to confide his secret in only those he trusted and if Lily wasn't one of those people, she wouldn't force him to trust her. She wanted him to trust her because he wanted to, not because he had no other choice.

They were decorating the Great Hall for Hallowe'en, a complex operation due to Mr. Filch's strict regulations about what adornments were easy to clean up. She was standing on one of the great wooden tables, casting charms to turn the candles orange, when she spotted Severus. For once, he wasn't watching her, and even from a distance, it seemed like he didn't want to be followed himself. She apologised to Remus and said she would be right back, running the length of the Great Hall and even then only making it out in time to see the end of his black robes vanish round the corner. She followed at a distance and soon realised, to her surprise, that he was heading to the Gryffindor Common Room. He stood outside, and Lily waited a safe distance away, not able to see him, but listening intently. Eventually, she heard the Portrait Hole open, and scuffling as someone climbed out. A murmured conversation took place and then she heard steps come towards her. Ducking into an alcove, she managed to avoid being seen and then sprinted up, where Severus had left, to see the Portrait swing shut.

She climbed in and looked around, and spotted the only person in there, a second year boy that Lily knew had a sister in Ravenclaw, but who she had never seen talk to Severus, or anyone in Slytherin.

To be fair, she had never seen Severus talk voluntarily to anyone other than her and a few teachers, outside of Slytherin. Still, it struck her as strange enough that she had to investigate. She shouted on the boy to stop, and he did, freezing in the middle of the floor, on his way to the dormitory stairs.

"Were you just speaking to Severus Snape?"

"No." His answer was immediate, but he looked a little uncertain. He seemed to grow pale under Lily's gaze, and she knew he was lying.

"I just saw you." She lied. She hadn't actually saw the pair speaking but she could guess at it.

"Mmm..." she shrugged, but she took it for an admission.

"What did he want?"

"Nothing." His eyes slid from her face, and focussed on the back of the Portrait on the wall. He was scared that, somehow, Snape would find out, and that it would be all the worse for him when he did.

His hand was behind his back, it would have been funny how poorly he hid it if the poor boy hadn't been so clearly distressed. She held out a hand.

"I'm a prefect, I'm going to have to confiscate whatever it is that you're hiding." She was worried that Severus had given the boy some dark object, or had talked him into playing some prank, though it seemed far from Severus's usual methods. She was surprised, then, when the boy, reluctantly, handed over a letter. She took it from him.

"Did Severus give this to you?"

He nodded.

"And what were you supposed to do with it?"

"Just deliver it, it's just a letter."

She looked down at the thin, folded sheet. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was all about. Tucking the letter into her pocket, she sent the boy away.

The Halloween feast was always a big event at Hogwarts. There were always beautiful decorations and enough food to fill everyone up twice over. The decorations, though Lily herself had set them up, were dazzling, the effect of the collaborative magic of Dumbledore and Flitwick had transformed the ceiling into a haze of silver cobwebs, across which danced a hundred tiny specks of light, every colour sparkling from the web overhead. The light came from a thousand sunset-orange candles that gave an even more remarkable impression than usual, and the tables were set with the usual gold plates, but made to look more festive by golden and orange flowers, and the normally house coloured banners that fluttered overhead were bright orange. Lily and her friends got down to the Great Hall as early as they could, knowing, from their five previous years of experience that the Hall filled up fast and if you weren't quick, you could end up balancing on the end of a bench, and having to ask someone to pass you everything.

It seemed every other person in the school had also realised this and there was a rush to get seats when the large, wooden doors swung open. She settled in, throwing a judgmental look at Sirius when he just about elbowed a second year in the head trying to get a seat near the roast potatoes. As the crowd thinned and order returned, Lily laughed along with the other Gryffindors, when James and Peter made a pantomime of wrestling one another for a single seat, before both struggling into the small space on the bench, James sitting almost on Peter's knee before either of them thought to ask Remus to move over slightly. Dumbledore kept his speech brief and soon Lily was spooning heaps of mashed potatoes and carrots onto her plate. She had spent all of that day thinking about the letter. Not having any classes, her Sunday had been taken up with pretending to study, while she was really staring at the letter, willing herself either to read it or burn it. She couldn't make up her mind either way and so she was stuck in something of a limbo.

She had kept the letter in her pocket all day, through, and every so often she would work up enough courage to take it out, sometimes even lift the envelope open, and then, her courage would fail and she would tuck it away. She wasn't sure what he might have to say in a letter, and she was almost certain that it wouldn't be good.

It was a lovely distraction from the letter to sit, and talk with her friends. Mary and James had a brief, ultimately good-natured, fight about excessive Quidditch practices.

"Look, McDonald, the first match is only a few days away now!"

"Six, Potter! Six days away, at three hours a night, that's eighteen hours of practice before we play! I think that's more than enough time to get everyone of your strategies memorised and to play them all through, we do not need four hours a night!"

Aidan Lewis, the fourth year who played Keeper raised his glass at that and shouted "Hear, Hear!" over the din in the hall. James didn't look happy.

"I'm sure you'll be fine with an extra hour, and the thing is, if we lose, I'm the one at fault. I'm the one people will be saying didn't work hard enough, didn't train long enough... not any of you!"

"Please! There are a lot of things I could accuse you of, I've practically memorised every possible negative word you might be described with, thanks to Lily," she pointed with her knife, and Lily blushed, shooting an apologetic look at James, who broke into a smile, "but no one, even if we lost 300-0, could ever say that you didn't work hard enough. At Quidditch, anyway."

"And getting Lily Evans to tolerate you!" Sirius added, through a mouthful of what might have started as roast beef.

The entire group laughed, except James and Lily, both of whom looked embarrassed.

"Why is it," Lily asked, "that all of you seem to think that all James does is worry about my opinion of him?"

"We don't think that. You're not the only thing he thinks about. It's about twenty hours Evans to four hours Quidditch." Sirius laughed, to general amusement. Once again, James and Lily weren't laughing. James seemed more than a little embarrassed and Lily, though uncomfortable, was a little entertained to see the colour rise to James's face, his gaze drop to his plate, and to see him mumble to Sirius to shut up.

"I don't just think about Quidditch." James moaned.

"And Evans?" Sirius supplied, with an innocent grin.

"I don't just think about Evans and Quidditch." He affirmed.

Then, Jac joined the conversation, having previously been distracted by flirting with a boy at the Ravenclaw table.

"Yeah, he's right! It's not just those, he probably thinks about his new girlfriend a lot?" She had a trouble-making sort of smile on her face, and Lily could have sworn that Jac looked straight at her, and gave the tiniest of winks. She didn't know what that was about.

"Girl- what are you talking about, Jac?" James asked, and Lily suddenly noticed that she hadn't tried the steak pie, and occupied herself with heaping a great piece onto her plate. She refused to look at anyone. She remembered the night she had tried to do all her homework, after James had mentioned his Hogsmeade date. It had been a long night, Lily had tried to stay up and do as much homework as she could, but it had descended into madness when Lynn had returned to the room with a massive box of Chocolate Cauldrons, the kind with the extra-strong firewhiskey inside. It the chocolates hadn't managed to make them tipsy enough to be a little too chatty, the two bottles of actual firewhiskey would have done it. She couldn't clearly remember the details of the conversation they had had, but she remembered perhaps mentioning, once or twice, that James was going on a date with Helen Carr.

"I'm not saying that I don't understand it, I'm just saying that... I don't get it, y, know?" She flopped dramatically onto her bed, the bottle clutched in her right hand.

"Yeah, I get it. I mean, I get that you don't get it. They don't even know each other!"

"Well, that's part of the reason people go on dates, to get to know one another!" Karen reasoned.

"Whose side are you on?" Lily muttered, "And I highly doubt that Potter's asking her out to get to know her."

"I didn't realise there were sides, I thought your little...fight was over."

"It wasn't a little fight, it was a major disagreement on important principles."

She had drank the majority of one bottle and, not being a regular drinker, she was more sensitive to its effect. The result of which being that she had spent the rest of the evening alternating between dancing, singing and complaining.

Lily had been trying not to look anyone in the eye, cutting up the crust of her pie, waiting for the conversation to move on from James's possible new girlfriend. It wasn't that she didn't want James to have a girlfriend, or anything like that, it was just that it was a little embarrassing seeing that she had thought he was asking her out, and he turned out to have been talking about Helen, that, coupled with the fact that Sirius kept making off-hand jokes about things that James might have said about her, she just felt like everyone would be looking at her for a reaction, and she didn't know how to convey the right mix of 'I'm happy you've got a girlfriend' and 'I really don't care about your love life, because I definitely don't fancy you', without coming off like she was trying to hide her true feelings.

Jac, she knew without looking, remembered clearly the night of the firewhiskey-induced complaining, and she was doing this just to wind Lily up.

"Your girlfriend, your Hogsmeade date, Helen? How did the date go, by the way?"

"Fine. It was fine." James nodded, swallowing the bread he had been chewing. "How did you hear about that?"

Lily was going to stab Jac, or run, those were her two options if Jac so much as mentioned 'firewhiskey'.

"Lily mentioned it..." Lily gripped her knife, hoping that she wouldn't have to impale her friend. "Yeah, I was going to ask you all to meet us in the Three Broomsticks, but Lily said you wouldn't be able to. Helen Carr, was it?" Jac had saved herself at the last minute. Lily wouldn't need to impale her after all.

"Oh. Right." James showed no surprise, and continued eating.

Lily wondered about the date. Not that she wanted to go on a date with him, she didn't. Still, she hadn't been on a proper date in a while, she had spent most of fifth year trying to pretend that her best friend wasn't slowly becoming a member of a violently anti-Muggle group and so hadn't really had time for trips to Hogsmeade even if she had found someone who was interested and not put off by the Slytherin. She missed the thrill, the fun of the whole event, and she wondered, just for a second, whether Helen Carr had enjoyed her date with Potter.

As the Halloween feast continued, Lily was struck by how nice it was to be in one big group. All the sixth year Gryffindors, with the exception of Nigel who was eating with his seventh year friends, were crowded in together, and were chatting happily. James and Lily had prevented this earlier in the year but before that, back when Lily had Severus, they had never felt as close. There was James and his friends, Lily, who was polite to everyone and nice, but not best friends with any of them, the girls, Jac and Karen, and Lynn and Beth, then Adi and Nigel, who had groups of friends outside their year and house respectively. Now, they felt like a group, Lily couldn't have said why, but they were closer than before, and Lily, who had spent a lot of her younger years worrying that if she lost Severus, she wouldn't have any friends at all, found that she liked her new situation very much. She didn't want to change anything, and opening that letter, reading whatever was inside, would only open a door to a whole other range of problems that Lily was sick of worrying about. She pushed the letter further down into her pocket, and resolved to burn it the second she was alone in the Gryffindor Common Room.

She had been sitting in the common room, alone for a long time, holding the letter in her hand, unburned. Nearly a full week had passed and though Lily might have told herself that she hadn't had an opportunity to burn the letter, she was holding onto it. Out of the window she could see the shining lake, the moon being the only source of light, but being more than enough to illuminate the ripples of the great body of water. She watched, the still peace of the scene in front of her was a direct contradiction of how she felt, knowing what must be in the letter. She didn't know what to do. She needed to stop all this. She needed to make sure that no one got hurt, that nothing bad happened. It was all her fault. Eventually, she stood up, determined. Looking out one last time at the still-deserted lakeside, she had made up her mind.

Though she couldn't see them, and though they didn't know she was coming, dark figures were waiting by the lake, hidden by trees and the darkness. Their breath hung in the air and they pulled their dark cloaks around themselves. They had been careful not to wear any scarves or ties, though there would be no doubt that it had been them. The eyes watched the cold surface of the lake, waiting. They were waiting for a shadow to cross, for the familiar red to cross the land between the castle and the lake. Though the trees obscured them, the scene before them was bathed in the light of the almost-full moon that hung, watchful, in the sky. They waited, sure that the letter would do its work, sure that the prey would soon arrive. Lily didn't see, as she made her way through the corridors, and out onto the wet grass that slipped under her foot, but she was observed. When the others saw her, they felt excitement, the thrill of a plan well-formed, but one set of eyes, though dark enough to hide any glint of emotion, flickered slightly, the feeling hidden in them was dread. Those eyes knew that tonight, something terrible would happen, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing that would save her.


	12. Headaches and Hospital Wings

Little Note: This chapter is a fair bit shorter, so sorry about that.

Thanks to the reviewer who mentioned about chapter titles. I originally wanted to do chapter titles, I love them in other peoples' stories, but I couldn't think of a good one for the first. I'll look back over the story so far and try and do chapter titles from here on out. I want to do them all at once, so this one is untitled, Sorry Also, I didn't even think about the space at the start, I will fix it immediately. Thanks for the review, and all the other lovely reviewers too!

Thank you for reading this story so far, hopefully lots more to come!

It was dark. And it smelled clean. That was Lily's first thought, before she realised that her head was burning in agony. Opening her eyes, she saw a ceiling, and worked out that she was in the Hospital Wing. Why?

Probably something to do with the splitting pain in her head, she thought.

It was, she saw from squinting at the clock on the wall, very early in the morning. She searched for the last thing she remembered. Looking down on the lake, from Gryffindor Tower came clearly enough, but then, in a haze, she was seeing herself standing at the lake, as if she had flown right out of the window.

She wasn't alone.

There was a sharp, almost unbearable pain in her side.

A hissing whisper. 'Mudblood'.

A group of people were goading one another on, an eerie green light showed their faces, but she couldn't quite focus on them. It was as if every time she tried to see them, to look directly at their face, her eyes would rebel and slide away.

She couldn't remember anything, no details came to her. If this was the morning, she had forgotten the whole night. Though that thought scared her, and she wanted to make sure that nothing bad had happened, she couldn't quite seem to stand up and as she was trying to move the bedsheets back to force herself out of bed, she yawned, and by the time she had stopped, she was asleep.

She next woke to the sound of voices.

"Professor, she's in a precarious situation. She's suffered quite an injury. We have to let her rest."

"I promise I will not distress her, Poppy, but it's a very serious situation. I highly doubt that Miss Evans beat herself unconscious. So, we need as much as she can tell us. It won't take- Ah, she's awake!"

Lily had tried to sit up in her bed, and, seeing this, Madame Pomfrey rushed over to help. She plumped up the pillows behind Lily, and Professor McGonagall approached her. Her usually serious face was lined with concern.

"Miss Evans..." she started, and Lily was shocked to see genuine worry on her face. "How do you feel?"

Lily wasn't sure how to answer that. Every time she moved, her body ached. Every muscle was painful and protested when she tried to use it. "Horrible." She settled for honesty.

"I should think so. Now, I know that it's difficult, I know that you're in pain but is there anything you remember, about your attackers? I assume you were attacked?"

"Yes... but no, I can't remember..."

"What's the last thing you do remember?"

She thought back. Half-formed, memories came back, isolated and unconnected. She remembered chicken, at dinner. Then orange candles in the Great Hall. Severus. The Letter. She panicked, if she told McGonagall that right before she had been attacked she had confiscated and read, though she couldn't actually remember reading it now, a letter from Severus, a boy with whom her long friendship had recently ended, it wouldn't take long before he was accused. She couldn't bear people thinking that he had done this to her, just as she couldn't bear the creeping worry that he might have done.

"I remember eating dinner, then prefect duties, with Remus. I went up to Gryffindor Tower... and that's it."

McGonagall knew that Lily was lying, she was convinced. Still, after a moment of her harsh gaze, she softened and it seemed that if she thought Lily was keeping something back, she wasn't going to pressure her into talking about it. She asked Lily a few more questions, and Lily discovered that she had missed a whole day. And, she realised, seconds later, when a group of rowdy Gryffindors burst in, she had missed the Quidditch match. She knew this because two of the people were dressed in Gryffindor Quidditch uniforms, and the rest were decked out in red and gold, scarves and face paint. They gathered round her bed, despite Madame Pomfrey's gentle protestations about overcrowding, and Lily needing her rest.

Jac, stable, unflappable Jacqueline Prewett, was weeping, silent tears marring the lion emblem on her cheek. Karen's eyes were red and her lip quivered as she tucked her hair behind her ears, trying not to look upset.

"Oh, Lily! We thought you-" Jac dissolved into wails that were so unlike her that they scared Lily.

"What?" she panicked, wondering what could have happened that would have shocked Jac so much. "Is someone hurt? What happened?"

Everyone there looked at her like she was stupid, but she thought it was pretty obvious what she meant.

"I clearly mean, other than me! I'm fine! What scared you?"

"Lily..." Remus Lupin spoke up, sitting down on the end of her bed, his tranquil, wise voice seeming very befitting to a sickbed. "Lily, you were attacked. Hagrid found you unconscious by the Lake, apparently there was blood everywhere..." Sirius took over.

"We were walking back up from the Quidditch match, and we saw all these people crying, and hugging one another, and they said that a body had been brought up from the Lake, and they knew it was you because they saw your hair, Ginger." He reached across to ruffle her hair. She laughed and Jac managed a weak, watery smile. The attempt at humour brought smiles to everyone's faces. That was something Lily noticed, when situations were dire, people were more willing to search for something to laugh at, they would be amused, if not deeply amused, by the slightest joke.

"We were so scared that you were... dead." Karen gulped, struggling over the last word.

Lily couldn't remember anything, not being at the Lake, though as she thought about it, she had a vague piece of a recollection of standing – no, lying? – on the pebble strewn side of the Lake, looking at- no, it wouldn't come together, she couldn't see it.

McGonagall had left them to their chat, and Pomfrey allowed them to hang around, perhaps a while longer than she would have it it hadn't been the group of charming Gryffindors that were present.

Peter gave her what was left of the sweets he had been eating during the match and as she sorted through them, looking for pink ones, she remembered.

"Oh no! How was the game?" she looked at James, worried, but also quite glad that she had a good excuse for missing the game. As excuses went, lying unconscious after having been brutally attacked was fairly unimpeachable.

It wasn't James who spoke, but Mary. Lily couldn't help but notice that James hadn't said anything and when she really looked, she saw that he seemed very pale, almost sickly, and his hands were clasped together, but she could see a light shaking in his fingers.

"We lost. But only just, there were ten points in it in the end, we were leading by 160-20, thanks to James here, but Morrison got the snitch. We're not out yet, of course!"

Lily cursed the Slytherin seeker loudly. She felt bad for her house, and the team, and for James, but also it was more than a little annoying to think that the idea of Lily as James's lucky charm was only cemented by her absence and their loss. Was it the loss that James was upset about? Or her near-death experience?

She didn't have time to ask, or even consider it because Jac pounced on her, and spent the next ten minutes alternating between hugging her and crying. When she slowed down, and accepted a tissue to wipe her eyes, the question she had been dreading came.

"D'you why- or who- or anything? Do you remember what happened?"

"Not really."

"Why were you down by the Lake?"

"Dunno."

"D'you think that the Sl-" Karen barely had time to ask her question before Madame Pomfrey who, although she had retreated to give Lily and her friends some privacy, wasn't above eavesdropping and swooped in. Evidently, the discussion was likely to cause Lily distress and would slow her recovery. She shooed the group out, though looked close to relenting at the protestations, and told Lily that she would be spending the night there, but could likely, if everything went well, return to her own bedroom by tomorrow night, ready for attending classes on Monday morning. Perfect, thought Lily, heaven forbid that an attempt on her life should keep her from a Potions class.

She ate, and napped, and worked slowly through an essay on the Patronus charm for Defence Against the Dark Arts, but nothing really happened. The Hospital Wing was deserted and Madame Pomfrey seemed to think that familiarity might impede her ability to heal students and so never stopped to do more than practical checks on Lily's biggest cuts and bruises. There was a long slice that had been made in her forearm that simply refused to heal, and had only stopped spouting blood when tightly bound with a great quantity of bandages. She realised with a sinking feeling that she had been hit, amongst others, with Sectumsempra. It wasn't necessarily Severus who had used the spell, he might have simply told someone, or had his notes taken, but Lily was forcefully reminded of the fact that it was a spell of his own invention. Whether he had meant to or not, Severus Snape had wounded her beyond repair once again. The cuts that the spell had caused were soon healed, pale lines tracing the places on her chest and stomach where the blast had been concentrated. She tried to put it out of her mind, the idea that even when she had distanced herself from him, he still found ways to hurt her, his existence still stung. The second she thought of it she was reminded that she had once heard James Potter say something very similar, the idea that Severus's existence was enough to annoy him. Lily wasn't annoyed by Severus's existence, even his presence, but she feared it now. She ought to have feared it before but trust and faith had blinded her. He had accused her of being blind to James's faults, but she couldn't help but think that she had always seen James's faults excruciatingly clearly and he had never tried to hide them. Severus on the other hand, had blinded her, had hidden from her a huge part of who he was, and that blindness had led her to injury. She was more aware now than ever before of who the people she cared about really were, and what they were capable of.

She was jolted from her daze by the sound of footsteps entering the Hospital Wing. She looked up, being the only person in the Wing, it wasn't a stretch to imagine that it might have been a visitor for her. Looking up to see exactly how quickly this guest would be ejected from what Madame Pomfrey seemed to treat like a high-security prison. It was Remus, alone. Now that she looked at him, her eyes slightly more focussed now that the pain had lessened, she could see that a stay in the Hospital Wing might have been the best thing for him, perhaps he was sick again. Then she remembered the whole he's-a-werewolf revelation and she was suddenly overcome with pity. He looked so sickly, so utterly downcast that she wanted to hug him, she wanted desperately to help him, but there was surely nothing she could do.

He looked over at her bed but he didn't immediately walk over to her, as someone who had been visiting her would. She had no idea if it was a full moon. When she thought about it, a sudden flash of a nearly perfect circle of white light hanging above her. She could feel the ice cold damp of the ground on her back, knew she was looking up at the sky, and felt, for the split second before she was pulled back to reality, the sensation of water rushing along her arms and legs, trickling over her to mingle with the water already on the grass.

The light of the moon expanded outwards and she was soon presented with the Hospital Wing, exactly as it had been before. She looked down at her arm, which had started to ache, and noticed a dark stain spreading across the bandage. The wound had re-opened, and she realised, perhaps it wasn't water that had been running over her, as she lay, inert, on the grass.

Forcing herself away the horrible, twisting sickness that accompanied remembering things, she smiled and raised the hand that wasn't bleeding to Remus.

"Hello!" she chirped, trying to make it easy for him to see that she was completely unsuspecting about any illness he might be afflicted with, and that even if he knew that she was aware, which she had a suspicion he might, she was not concerned or scared in the least by it. It was, in any case, the truth. She wasn't scared of Remus, and she didn't see any reason to attach blame to him, scorn him and judge him for something that he hadn't wanted and had never deserved.

"Hi Lily... I just wanted to check..."

For someone who had to lie a lot, he was surprisingly slow to come up with an excuse. She helped him out.

"Madame Pomfrey mentioned there was a bad cold going around Hogwarts, unlucky that you'd get it! Still, I think everyone's bound to get it sooner or later, with such a small school. You're probably better off getting it out of the way now, because you could catch it just before Christmas and that would...be annoying."

She had overdone it, and it had come out sounding less like a casual chat and more like a rant. Remus looked a little relieved though and Lily was grateful for that.

Before he could say anything more, Pomfrey descended and she dragged him round, telling him to settle on the bed next to Lily before bustling off to get what she loudly and pointedly declared in Lily's direction to be a 'simple cold remedy'.

Honestly, with the lack of subtlety around here, she was surprised more people hadn't worked out the secret.

There was a moment of awkward silence in which Lily forced herself not to reassure Remus that she didn't care one bit what he was or what he turned into and that anyone who did wasn't worth thinking about. She wanted him to feel safe with her, she wanted him to know that she wasn't a threat, that she was one of the good, decent people. Still, she couldn't reconcile this desire to be seen as a friend with the amount of autonomy that it would rob Remus off. She couldn't bear to take from him this thing which he could choose, in a situation where choice was so scarce.

He ought to be free to keep his secret, if that made him feel safe.

Still, upon realising that a good friend is a werewolf, you will find that very few conversation topics not directly related to said werewolf-issue are forthcoming. This was the issue facing Lily, and so she resorted to the only other thing that came to mind.

"So, was the Quidditch match really all that bad? James looked pretty desolate."

"It... wasn't great, to be honest. I think you're the official Gryffindor team lucky charm now."

"Damn." She scowled. In spite of herself, she couldn't help wonder if there was something in it. The statistics really were quite tilted in favour of her having some impact on the team. She shook the thought away, it was ridiculous.

"Does it really bother you?" Remus asked, apparently he was a psychic as well as a werewolf.

"Yes, of course. Though, I suppose he's called me worse things."

"No he-" Remus stopped himself. Whether he agreed with her, or simply saw no merit in arguing, she didn't know, but he didn't argue.

"I've been called worse things in general." She was thinking of Petunia, and her near-constant refrain of distaste whenever she spoke to Lily away from their father. She remembered Snape and his name for her and 'Lucky charm' didn't seem so bad. "I still don't like it though." She was stubborn, if nothing else and wasn't going to admit to a certain satisfaction, a strange, selfish little feeling that Gryffindor hadn't one 500-0.

Remus took his potion, which Madame Pomfrey described three more times to Lily, even going so far as to list the ingredients, and was ordered to rest on the bed for a while.

Silence had descended between them, but Lily had not too long ago taken her own potion for the pain and was feeling energetic enough to be filled with chatter. Rolling her head to the side, she looked across to where he lay, staring at the ceiling in a way that reminded her of seasickness, like when she had been on that boat with her mum and dad and Petunia to Arran and the waves had got too big and the sea had been too rough.

"Remus?" she hissed in a whisper.

"Yes, Lily?"

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine."

"Okay, good... I'm glad."

"Thanks"

"You're welcome."

"Remus?"

"Yes, Lily?"

"Are you a bit bored?"

"Not really."

"Oh... I am. I've been here for ages."

"I know, but you slept through most of it."

"I was still here."

"Fair enough."

He didn't want to speak, she couldn't say anything more.

"Lily?"

"Yes, Remus?"

"You do know that James would stop the whole 'lucky charm' thing if he thought it was bothering you?"

"I know. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got to keep up my image of stern, serious Lily Evans who disapproves of everything James Potter does." She had a vague feeling in the back of her mind that this might be the sort of thing she wanted to think and not say, but the relief from the lack of pain was almost like a half-bottle of firewhiskey in its dizzying effects and she couldn't quite remember to keep the thoughts and the words separate.

"Lily, I don't think anyone who has spent more than twenty seconds with you would use the word 'stern' to describe you."

"I am serious though."

"About some things, but everyone is."

"Not everyone. Not James." She thought she had a great point there and smiled smugly at her answer, but Remus turned his gaze from the ceiling for the first time and looked at her. It was hard to tell from her sideways view, but he looked a little annoyed, maybe somewhat frustrated, and a bit sad, but it was, after all, very hard to tell.

"Sometimes I forget, you don't really know him at all."

Before she could figure out what that meant, she was interrupted by Pomfrey and her apparent rule against fraternising with fellow inmates, who told her, rather abruptly, to get some sleep and pulled over a partition to separate her from view of the sickly boy in the next bed.

She attempted to pull one of the books from which she had been reading over to her, but her mind kept sliding away. After Pomfrey had finished with Remus and spotted what was now a rather considerable size of bloody bandage around her forearm, and after she had finished shrieking about how she couldn't be expected to heal Lily if Lily refused to inform her of massive blood losses, Lily forced herself to read. It was the only thing that made Madame Pomfrey cease her lectures, and Lily rested the book on her chest and tried to make the words stay still.

She had obviously fallen asleep without meaning to at some point, because when she woke up it was to the utter darkness provided by a book that had fallen over her face. Lifting it up provided not much more light and she knew it was night, she had missed the rest of the day. She immediately felt ravenously hungry and looked around, her eyes settling on the bag of sweets that Peter had left much earlier. She couldn't see their colours in the dim light, and after a few nibbles, she abandoned the attempt.

She tried to sit up, everything in her body hurting, but she was really hungry and she searched through the cabinet at the side of her bed, hoping that one of her friends might have been kind enough to leave sweets for her. They hadn't, and she lay back down with a sigh. She stared at the ceiling and watched the progress of a moth as it fluttered through the moonlight streaming in from the window outside. Remus was gone.

As soon as the matron retreated for what surely must have been the final round of the night, Lily shuffled out of bed, having slowly felt the ability to move return and searched around her bed for her uniform. The clothes she had been wearing were nowhere to be seen, and she knew that the letter, whatever had been inside, were gone with the clothes. She was certain that if she could only read the letter, the words that had spurred her to end up down at the Lake, she would understand, she would remember. She knew exactly where her clothes would be, and hoped against hope that the Hogwarts House elves checked the pockets of clothes before washing them.


	13. A Need for Avoidance Tactics

It was about six o'clock on Sunday evening before Madame Pomfrey pronounced her fit and let her go. She headed straight for the Great Hall, her desire to eat the sort of fat-filled food that Pomfrey had denied her overtaking her desire to not be stared at by four tables full of her peers. She noticed a definite lull in the chatter as she entered but most of the looks she received were genuinely concerned and seemed to be glad to see her. She responded to a few comments by saying that she was fine, and thanking them, and made a concerted effort to ignore the Slytherin table, some of whom were looking over with interest, but a few of whom seemed disappointed that she still had all her limbs. She might not have known who had attacked her, but she would have bet every galleon in Gringott's that they were sitting at the Slytherin table.

She reprimanded herself for that as she took a seat next to Jac. It wasn't fair to assume that the only bad people in the school were Slytherins, she shouldn't think that. Still, she hadn't told Professor McGonagall about Snape's letter partly because she didn't want to let that same prejudice put him into the frame as the main suspect, but also because there was a part of her that feared that the idea might be well-founded. If she could only remember what had been in the letter, what had brought her to the side of the lake. There were so many things that felt blurry to her, the past week felt like a prisoners letter, with occasional parts cut out or censored and the meaning unclear. She couldn't think about the letter for too long without her head starting to ache, as if her brain didn't want her to remember.

"Nice to see you back amongst the living, Lily!" Nigel half-shouted over the din that had returned, and Lily tried to laugh along. Pretty much everyone found Nigel intolerable as he had that habit of saying inappropriate things and striking the complete wrong tone. Lily couldn't honestly say that she liked Nigel, but she was more able to tolerate him than Jac, who was already grinding her teeth.

"Glad to be back!" she smiled, hoping that would be enough. It never was with Nigel.

"So, what exactly happened to you, there's all sort of rumours flying around. I don't like to listen to them, myself. I much prefer my news straight from the source, as it were." He gestured to her with the gravy-covered knife he was holding, the words having come through a mouthful of pie crust.

"Honestly, I don't remember much..." she focussed on the carrots she had put on her plate, slicing them into ever-smaller cubes.

"Oh, come on, Lily! You're among friends here. They found you by the lake, so how did you get there?"

"I don't..." Lily felt a twinge in her head at the mention of the lake, and had to close her eyes. The candle light that illuminated the Great Hall suddenly seemed far too bright, the heat from it was sweltering. She put a hand over her eyes, and tried to recover. "Sorry, Nigel, I just don't have much to say about the whole thing..."

"Really, Lily? You can't remember anything? I would think that you might be-"

"Nigel!" a shout came from a few seats down. James Potter was watching, an expression on his face that showed both concern and anger, an expression that reminded her of how he had looked when he had run after her at Jac's party, out into the trees. He seemed to be about to say something threatening. Lily couldn't help but bristle. She knew that he was only trying to be nice, but she could deal with Nigel by herself and she certainly didn't think that it would prove to her that James Potter had changed in any real way if his first instinct were to threaten someone who annoyed him. At it happened, it wasn't James who spoke.

"Shut up, Nigel, can't you see she's had a hard enough time recovering without you interrogating her?" Karen hissed, looking ready to spear Nigel with a fork.

"Yeah, leave her in peace for a minute, eh?" Adi joined in, before meeting her eyes and sending her a questioning glance, to which she nodded her thanks.

Lily was all the more convinced as she returned to her carrots that she really was one of a group, a group who defended one another. It was a lovely feeling and she appreciated it.

The Monday morning that followed would have been horrible anyway, being a Monday and a morning, two of Lily's least favourite things, but it's horribleness was magnified by the fact that she had a body covered in massive, aching cuts and bruises, the remainders of the bloody mess she had been when first taken to the Hospital Wing. She had been counselled not to do anything too strenuous for the next few weeks, and to come back at regular intervals to have her bandages changed, the slash that ran the length of her right forearm being particularly unwilling to heal.

She allowed herself a few seconds of lying in bed, her eyes opened to the deep red canopy above and she tried to force her legs to work. If she relaxed and lounged for a moment longer, she would make it ten times harder to get up. Mainly through the use of her elbows, she found her way onto the floor and crawled about, feeling ridiculous but not trusting her spinning head and shaking legs to support her if she stood. She would simply wait until the last possible moment to stand up. She as she pulled her robes round her, and searched in her trunk for the other sock to match the one in her hand, Lynn opened her eyes and immediately started to laugh at the slow, arthritic movement of the invalid.

"What in God's name are you up to, Lily?"

This question woke Beth and Karen, who joined in the laughter. Jac didn't wake up until Lily shouted at them to shut up.

"I'm in pain, you horrible-"

"Oi, Evans! Shut up, it's too early for your 'prefect voice'!" Jac grumbled, but she was awake and as the resident late sleeper, her arrival into the land of the living was the signal for everyone else to start getting ready.

I really have horrible friends, Lily thought to herself, as she made her way, painfully, down the stairs to the Common Room, and then rolled gracelessly through the Portrait Hole. Their laughter was good-natured and they would have stopped if she had seemed really upset, she knew, but her exaggerated facial expressions and whining would have been funny if she hadn't been in pain. She was about half way down the stairs from Gryffindor Tower when there started to gather a slight crowd of people, Gryffindors who were trying to get to breakfast and who had been unlucky enough to get caught behind Lily, who was going embarrassingly slowly in an attempt to ease the pain that shot up her legs and weakened her resolve with every step.

"Come on, Lily! Get a move on!"

"What's the queue about?"

"Can I get past? I'm in a hurry!"

"Lily, if you don't hurry up, I'll push you myself down these bloody stairs!"

That last voice was Sirius Black, and while there was humour in it, she quickened her pace, so as not to test him. When she reached the bottom of the flight, she stepped aside, and a stream of people rushed passed. Most said hello, asked her how she was, or apologised for hurrying her.

"You took your time!" Peter chuckled, as he jumped the last stair and smiled at her.

"You okay, Lily?" Remus looked concerned and white as a sheet, she thought he must be the most understanding, as his illness left him in continually poor health.

She nodded, trying to look as if she was simply letting others pass, when the truth was that the brief set of stairs had just about taken it all out of her. What was McGonagall thinking, letting her attend classes in this state?

James joined the congregation at the foot of the stairs, and looked at Lily, concerned as the others.

"D'you need a hand, Evans? It looks like that just about killed you!"

"I'm fine! Really!" she squeaked, forcing the pain out of, and levity into, her voice. "Honestly, go on!"

"Well, we'll save you a seat..." He looked doubtful, but she thought he understood her, that she didn't want a big fuss surrounding her on her way into the Great Hall, and he left.

Sirius hung back.

"Are you really alright, Lily?"

"I'll manage."

When he left, she grasped Lynn and muttered, "I cannot manage. You are going to have to carry me, or I'll die."

Gratitude just about overwhelmed her when she felt Beth slip around and take her other arm, and between the pair of them, Lily progressed slowly down the corridor, with Jac and Karen clearing the students in front of them with loud cries of 'Injured Prefect coming through! Move Please!' and 'Oi! Move it, pipsqueak!" from Karen and Jac respectively.

Classes that day seemed interminable, and despite the teachers being mostly sympathetic and Flitwick excusing her from homework, which she would do anyway, she was too exhausted at the end of the day to face the Great Hall.

Jac insisted on accompanying her to the common room, promising to bring Lily some food to the dormitory, but Lily sent her away after she had helped her up the first flight. Help from Jac consisted of half-dragging, half-carrying Lily up, bumping her repeatedly into the banister. She was trying to help, but Lily wasn't sure she would survive the walk, so she swore she would be fine alone and forced Jac to walk back down the stairs, which she did, reluctantly.

She regretted the decision, moments later when she heard her name ring down the corridor. She panicked for a moment, which she didn't like. A few years ago, she would have been interested and friendly, unguarded, but now, someone shouting her name simply made her wonder who exactly was about to embarrass or berate her, it seemed she was avoiding half the school.

This particular shout came from Nigel. She was almost relieved, as she had been expecting Rita to launch a new campaign of digging to unearth whatever it was that she suspected Lily of hiding.

"Hello, Nigel." She forced herself to look friendly. She was doing that a lot these days, another thing she didn't like.

"Lily, good to see you! I thought we might get a chance to speak privately. Never did see you in Hogsmeade!"

Lily wouldn't have wanted to talk any more about the attack, but she thought he might focus on her near-death experience, rather than them not meeting in the village. Still, she couldn't deny it was a change.

"No, sorry about that, Nigel, I was a bit tired and I didn't see you."

"Not a problem, not at all! I just thought we might get a chance to chat. I hope you're healing up well?"

If it had been anyone else she would have given a sarcastic response, but there was no point with Nigel. She was tired and sore and wanted nothing more than to crawl into her bed and be unconscious.

Nigel insisted on helping her up the stairs and she reluctantly accepted. He turned out to be a better help than Jac, but was far less tolerable because he accompanied every step with a question, or a breezy attempt at a joke. She thanked him curtly, and tried to rush away, but he stopped her.

"Lily, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you're well. I don't suppose you'd like to go out on a date sometime?"

Her immediate response was 'no', but she was kind and couldn't bring herself to say it. All her reasons about being hurt by Severus, and confused by Potter aside, she wasn't attracted to Nigel, she thought he was pompous and sort of uncaring about people who he didn't want something from. Also, there was still a vague chance that Robert Polski might be about to profess his undying affection for her and, however remote that chance, she preferred it to the reality of Nigel.

"Oh, Nigel... I'm not really- I mean I don't..." There was no nice way to say it. Nigel gasped, then nodded knowingly, he seemed to have understood something.

"Aah! Say no more, Lily. I rather wish you had just told me when I invited you to Hogsmeade before. I didn't realise that you had a boyfriend."

Oh, now honestly! Lily couldn't quite believe him, that was the sort of arrogance she might have expected from James Potter. Was it only possible that she could be reluctant to date Nigel because she had someone else, was she not allowed an opinion independent of her relationship status. That alone, that arrogance, would have been enough to make her want to refuse him. She was so tired that she didn't even try to hide her annoyance. Rolling her eyes, she turned away.

"Goodnight, Nigel."

Lily was woken from her cocoon of blankets on her bed by Jac, clutching a book bag that was bursting with food, mostly sweets, because it was easier to carry doughnuts and a very crushed slice of apple pie, than soup and stew. She thanked Jac, muttered 'Nigel is a big idiot' and, after a few mouthfuls of dessert, she succumbed to the sleep that was so strongly pulling her back under.

She fell asleep to the sound of Jac answering her, "I know, he's a prat." And someone else, maybe Karen, asking what she meant, but before she could answer, she was asleep.


	14. Backfiring Potions

Can only apologise for the delay.

Still working on the chapter titles. Sorry!

Hope you enjoy.

Chapter Fourteen

Lily's legs stopped hurting gradually, and by the time Slughorn announced his first big Slug Club party a week later, she could no longer use the injuries as an excuse. It was to be held on the Friday. Normally, he gave more than two days warning, but he told her that it was a quickly arranged one and that he regretted not having thrown a Halloween party.

"I meant to throw a little get together in the week after Halloween, you know I always think that there is a bit of a lull. Not quite Christmas time, but when Halloween is over, it's a little dull."

"Hmm..." Lily tried not to speak. She thought that she wouldn't mind a bit of dullness, a bit of a break from the rapid-fire succession of disasters that she had been dealing with since returning to Hogwarts.

Slughorn took her silence for agreement.

"Well, Miss Evans, I'm hoping to see you there. Have a good breakfast, Potions today will be a tricky one, though not for you, I'm sure!"

He chuckled and strode off, forcing the students making their way up the hall to dive to either side to avoid being flattened. She managed about three steps down the corridor, before someone tapped her on the arm. She looked around and saw Pandora, a fourth year Ravenclaw, who whispered to her in an undertone.

"I'd try and hide if I were you, Lily."

"Why?" She was taken aback by what appeared to be seaweed in the younger girls hair, but she knew better than to ask what it was.

"I saw Rita looking for y-"

"Lily!"

She turned and made a noise somewhere between a gasp of surprise and a groan. Pandora had been right, but a little too late to be of any help. Rita Skeeter was barely two inches from Lily's face, a strand of Lily's hair had flicked across her face and Lily had to pull it and free it from her blonde, lacquered curls.

"Lily!" her voice was falsely conspiratorial, as if they were best friends and Lily had kept a secret from her. "I thought you would have told me your big news!"

"What is my big news?" Lily moaned, almost past caring about the latest rumours. Pandora took a step away from her, staring at the ceiling as if she hadn't just been warning Lily about this very situation.

"My turn to ask questions!" Rita chided, she wasn't really the sort to answer questions.

"Rita, I'm busy, I have to go! Bye, Pandora!" She skirted quickly around Rita and started off down the corridor. Rita shouted after her, not one to surrender a subject while they were still free of tears.

"Can I assume you'll be bringing the new boyfriend to Slughorn's party?"

"She's a bloody nightmare, that Rita! Now, every person I talk to at that party is going to be in the frame for my new boyfriend. I wouldn't be surprised if she's taking odds on it!"

"Nah, no chance! She's not in it for the money, she just enjoys ruining people's lives." Jac was shaking some crumbling leaves into her cauldron, and Lily dived across the desk to stop her before she added too many.

"Well, she's not exactly ruining my life, just complicating it. Slughorn always expects us to bring someone along, and now I can't ask..."

"Who? Who were you going to ask?" Jac jumped on the issue excitedly.

"Dunno, I just mean anyone... No one's going to want to go with me."

"I'll go!" Jac smirked. "We could really start a rumour!"

At that, Karen laughed loudly from the other side of the table, and a few of the tables around them looked over, some reproachfully, for Slughorn had been right and the potion was very complex, others curiously.

"Shh!" Lily hissed, looking apologetically up, but failing to keep the smile from her face.

"Don't shush me, Lily! You'd better get a date, it's starting to be sad, first Hogsmeade, now Slughorn's party!"

"Oh, shut up! You sound like Potter, there's nothing wrong with being by yourself!" She involuntarily glanced towards where the four boys were working, a table over and saw that James had obviously overheard his name, and was looking straight into his cauldron, with a fixed, frozen sort of expression that suggested he was listening to every word.

The opportunity to wind up James Potter didn't come often, and with all the very serious things that had happened to her, she hadn't been fun in a while. Hadn't she resolved to be more fun?

Now was her chance, if only she could play this right.

Nudging Jac, she raised her voice slightly, not enough to make it clear that she was trying to be overheard.

"Yeah, I heard about that! I don't usually trust any of Rita's rumours, but I kind of believe that one."

Both Jac and Karen looked confused, but followed Lily's glance and saw James, eyes resolutely secured to his potion, and both broke into massive grins. Lily was surprised they had understood so quickly, maybe they were naturally more fun than her. Jac certainly was but she thought that perhaps she was on a par with Karen as far as being dull went.

Still, Karen was having a secret romance, and that was pretty not boring. Lily resolved that she should have a secret romance at some point although really, any romance would have been noteworthy.

Jac chimed in.

"Well, I didn't hear it from Rita, so she's obviously already started her work on spreading it about! You'd think she was getting paid!"

Then Karen added to the effort.

"You know, now that I think about it, I never really hear any gossip about James, he causes trouble but he's never really the subject of rumours..."

"That's because he's not ashamed of anything, rumours only arise when you're private, or when you are the sort of person that people don't know a lot about. Potter's quite open about all the details of his life, so... nothing for people to wonder about, I suppose."

Jac and Karen nodded thoughtfully, then burst out laughing. They were so convincing that Lily almost asked what the joke was, but she dared a glance over at James, who had alerted the other three to the situation and now all four were standing in comic silence, ears clearly straining to hear the conversation.

Lily couldn't resist keeping going.

"But doesn't it make you think about... I mean, you have to wonder..." She raised her eyebrows knowingly. Lily hadn't gotten so far as to actually imagine what the rumour might be, and so she couldn't be specific, but Jac and Karen reacted wonderfully, contributing half-sentences and nearly formed thoughts that betrayed nothing as to the actual story. She was still Lily Evans, and she couldn't abandon her potion completely, no matter how entertaining the torment of James Potter was. She bowed her head and focussed on the book propped up in front of her. Her attention was able to stay on the instructions for about five seconds, as a ball of paper hit her head and fell onto the page in front of her.

She looked up and saw Jac and Karen smiling at one another mischievously.

She unfurled the parchment, and read.

Maybe you could take James to Slughorn's party? Rita's going to tell people about it anyway, might as well commit the crime if you're going to do the time.

She thought about scrunching the paper back up and chucking it at one of her friends but she couldn't decide which of them deserved to get hit more and Slughorn was approaching for his routine check of the cauldrons. She dropped the ball of paper into her open bag with a withering look at Jac and gave the bubbling contents of her cauldron a cursory stir.

The rest of Potions was passed by continuing the game of tormenting Potter and his friends. It was fun to be the one doing the annoying for once, she was so used to being the one with the sinking, panicked feeling of wondering what Potter had done now. Perhaps, she mused as she settled down to her lunch, greeting a pale Mary MacDonald with warmth.

"You okay, Mary?"

"Mm-hmm!" she nodded, her eyelids drooping as she spooned soup into her mouth. "I'm just tired, between Quidditch and classes, I'm barely sleeping..."

Lily felt bad for Mary, she sensed that in a year's time, she would be in a very similar situation. Not playing Quidditch but NEWTs were enough to stress about on their own and when combined with prefect duties and her uncanny knack for attracting stress and drama to her life, she thought that she might very well be the one committed to the Hospital Wing with stress.

She knew it wasn't her place, but as a newly-reconstituted acquaintance and classmate of James, she wondered if she mightn't be able to help poor Mary out.

Jac and Karen had put their heads together to come up with a piece of gossip that matched their reaction, an unusual sequence of events. Lily kept out of it, she knew from Karen's first suggestions that it was very likely going to involve some kind of romantic interest, and Lily was still a bit uncertain about how to convey her not-caring but still interested-as-a-friend-in-his-happiness.

She looked around when her two friends fell uncharacteristically quiet and saw that the topic of discussion had arrived. James looked a little reluctant to take the seat next to Jac but quickly got over it and sat down.

He seemed determined to avoid the issue, turning to the girls with an air of casual friendliness.

"So, that potion was a bit of a nightmare, wasn't-"

"What did you hear from Rita about James?" James might have been trying to avoid the issue, but Sirius wasn't so subtle.

Jac and Karen's eyes met and if Lily hadn't still been looking worriedly at Mary, she might have noticed the trouble-making smirk that crossed both their faces.

"What?" Karen blinked innocently, looking as if 'gossip' was a foreign word to her.

"In Potions," Sirius clarified, through a mouthful of bread, "You three were talking about it, sounded interesting! I like to keep up to date with my James gossip, and he hasn't told me anything!"

"Because there's nothing to tell!" James said, exasperation clear in his voice and Lily could tell that James had been subjected to Sirius's persistent questioning from the Potions to the Great Hall.

"Is that so, James?" Jac asked, one eyebrow raised in question.

"Yes!" he nodded, then looked doubtful. "Why, what did you hear?"

"Why? What did you do?" Karen countered, her smirk firmly in place, a smirk that Lily thought, having turned away from Mary to observe her work taking on a life of its own, must have seemed familiar to James. It was the same one he wore when calling her his lucky charm, that 'aren't-I-so-charming-and-witty' smile that drove Lily insane.

"Nothing..." he sounded less confident, and Lily wondered what he had done. She worried for a second that he might be thinking about Remus. If Lily had been a werewolf, she would have panicked whenever someone mentioned any kind of secret.

"You don't sound as sure as you did earlier!" Sirius said. "Oi, Evans! You're the one that brought it up, weren't you?"

James Potter might not have been the sort of person who was easily embarrassed, but Lily was pretty certain at that moment that James was not entirely the unabashed, open person that she thought he was, and that he was wishing that he could apparate away from this painful conversation.

"Look, just tell us, what's the rumour?"

Jac and Karen looked at one another, as if trying to decide whether to do something, the sort of thing that you only did if there was someone else, equally to blame, to take the consequences of it going wrong with you.

"Oh, nothing major, just the whole thing about you and Lily secretly dating."

A sudden urge to lodge her fork in Karen's eyeball overtook Lily, and she choked on the piece of food she had been working her way through.

"What?" Lily coughed, her voice mutinous as she looked furiously from Karen to Jac, realising her idea had just been thoroughly hi-jacked.

She choked out a denial, her face almost hissing as the heat poured out of her skin.

She absolutely couldn't meet the eye of any of the four gawping boys.

"Jac's joking, aren't you?" she said through gritted teeth, a silent threat passed between them, accompanied by a hard kick to the leg.

"'Course I'm joking!" Jac quickly laughed, but Lily couldn't bear it, she had to get out of there. Knowing that the exit would only raise more questions, she weighed her options for a few seconds before grasping the strap of her bag, and sprinting out of the Hall, food still in her mouth that she couldn't swallow because of the lump in her throat.

She had to face the fact that she cared what James Potter thought of her. She didn't fancy him, and she really would have preferred a date with the Giant Squid, but in the same way she had been pleased to hear that he had remembered her words, that she thought he was better than he pretended to be, she couldn't deny that she wanted him to think of her in a certain way.

To be fair, she wanted everyone to think of her in a certain way. She wanted them to see her as kind, and fair and considerate. She wanted to be thought of as strong and brave and dependable. She wanted them not to see the sadness, the sister of a girl who hated her, the best friend of a boy who couldn't see the worth of people like her. She wanted them to see her as a Gryffindor.

She couldn't deny that there had been a slight thrill to hearing Sirius repeating, in his casual, offhand way, compliments that James had paid her. She had needed to know that someone liked her, someone thought of her as something other than a 'mudblood' and a 'freak'. For so long, she had viewed herself through the eyes of Petunia and Severus, their opinions and experiences of her were all she considered herself to be made of. It had been a salve to a battered ego to hear the lovely words that a boy so respected thought of her. It had been nice to think that she was liked.

She didn't like James Potter, but she didn't want him to think he liked her. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she knew that if she really didn't care about him, it wouldn't have mattered to her a jot what he thought about her, but she dragged her mind away from that rarely-visited corner.

Trying to sort through her feelings had always been a monumental task for Lily, and she felt like there had been a rapid succession of things to care about since she had returned to Hogwarts.

She needed to forget about the James Potter feelings, they were no good to her now, she simply needed to forget about it and laugh it off when confronted with it. She could be casual and cool about the whole thing. She, Lily Evans, was fun and part of being fun was being able to take a joke.


	15. The Internal Agony of Lily Evans

It was strange to go to bed feeling so sickly and fragile and wake up feeling as if she had never felt ill or tired before in her life. She rolled herself out of bed and was washed and dressed before either Jac or Karen had so much as blinked the sleep from their eyes.

She gathered all the books she would need for the day into her bag and was crossing the bedroom to the door when a voice sounded from the bed to her side.

"Don't you dare, Lily!" Karen sat up in her bed, her hair messy and one cheek marked red from where she had lain on it for hours. Her eyes were surprisingly alert and she was staring with severity at Lily.

She pointed at Lily and then gestured to the end of her bed.

"Sit down! Oi, Jac!" She searched around her bed and found a pair of socks which she balled up and then aimed at Jac's inert figure. It made absolutely no impact, bouncing off her head, but failing to stir her.

"First, wake her. Then, sit!" Karen mumbled, and began to straighten her pyjamas that had become twisted around her in her sleep.

Jac took a moment to wake and Lily would have much preferred to go straight down to the Great Hall for breakfast and never have to speak about her little fainting spell.

She hadn't thought about it herself, and she didn't want to. It had been her strategy ever since she had been attacked not to dwell too much on Severus, or the Slytherins. She had spent a whole summer worrying and obsessing over Severus, and all it had meant was that she had been miserable, and isolated and perhaps, now that she allowed herself to consider it, a little more inclined to snap when faced with James Potter, who it had been easy to assign all of the blame to for her losing her best friend.

Jac and Karen were big fans of confronting problems. They were the sort of people who liked to sit down with a mug of tea and a few friends and talk about all of their problems, and Lily wasn't like that. She had, in the past, used these occasions to excuse herself and go see Severus. She generally was the sort to keep her problems to herself until they burst out of her, in the way magic used to before Hogwarts.

Still, with no one to pretend to have plans with, she was forced to go along with the orders. Neither Jac nor Karen were easily ignored, but in different ways.

Jac was loud but her demands were generally pretty quickly forgotten, whereas Karen had a tendency to cling on, she was the persistent sort, and unfortunately for Lily, they both cared about Lily and wanted the best for her. It was awful.

They both seemed to communicate wordlessly and they moved around Lily like mother hens, Karen tucked the covers underneath herself and tucked her hair behind her ears. Jac forced herself out of bed and stumbled, still rubbing her eyes, to Lily's side.

"So..." Jac mumbled, seemingly her sleepiness did not dull her curiosity. "What in the name of God happened to you?"

"Are you okay, Lily? I heard about what happened."

She wondered if it had been Jac that had told Karen about the whole thing, or if she had heard it from some other source. Perhaps one of the boys had met her in the Common Room last night, perhaps Rita had already extracted the information from someone who had overheard or seen her on the way back to Gryffindor Tower last night, or, heaven forbid, the Slytherins might have seen more than she had realised and might have spent the whole last night boasting about nearly killing the Muggleborn, though she doubted 'Muggleborn' would have been the word they chose to describe her.

"Who told you?" She was certain that Karen hadn't been in the dormitory when she had been dragged up the stairs and through the door.

"I heard Sirius and that talking about it in the Common Room, sounded like it was properly scary."

She didn't want to talk about it. She knew that if she spoke about the feeling of panic she got when the Slytherins confronted her, then they would connect it to when she was attacked at the Lake. She knew, without evidence or logic, that it had been the Slytherins who had attacked her. Not all of them, of course, but that group of pure-blood maniacs that had made it quite clear in public that they were heading straight towards the Death Eaters.

She couldn't argue with the line of reasoning that would lead them to assume that one particular Slytherin was involved. They would blame Severus, but she couldn't. Despite all the things that had happened, she couldn't really believe that Severus would hurt her. If she could only remember what had been in the letter, and what had happened after she had read it, then she could dispel that quiet but insistent voice that was always asking whether he had been there, whether he had attacked her.

She knew that if she told Jac or Karen about the letter, without being able to explain what was in it, they would jump to the worst conclusion. They had never been friends with Severus, they had never seen anything but the brooding, cruel side of him.

"I just...panicked a bit, I'm sorry. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I'm fine n- Would you two stop that!"

Lily had looked up to see that Jac and Karen were exchanging those irritating, meaningful looks.

"Sorry!" Jac held her hands up in apology. It was a symptom of the two being best friends for so long that they sometimes forgot to speak. "But Lily, you need to stop pretending you're okay. Look, did the Slytherins say or do someth-"

Lily had expected this, and she didn't want to deal with it.

"Jac, Karen, listen. I don't want to talk about this, I'm fine now, I just don't particularly like being reminded of the whole 'M-word' situation and seeing Severus with the Slytherins just brought it all back."

She jumped up and was already pulling the door open when Jac spoke.

"It's more than that and we all know it."

There wasn't anything she could say to that, she knew Jac was right, but before she could tell anyone the truth, or what she suspected to be the truth, she needed to get some answers to some very important questions.

And she knew who she needed to ask.

She couldn't eat breakfast, her stomach was writhing and churning from all her worries, so she didn't go, as she had planned, to the Great Hall, but headed instead to the Owlery.

Once there she pulled a piece of crumpled parchment from her bag and started to write a letter that she had composed already in her head ten times on the walk from Gryffindor Tower to the tower where the owls rested between journeys delivering letters and parcels.

Severus

I need to talk to you. There's something important that I think you can help me with. Please respond.

Lily

She couldn't bring herself to call him 'Sev', but 'Snape' didn't feel right either. She tucked it into an envelope that she had pinched from Karen and wrote Severus's home address on the back, hoping that if it was received by someone else, they might think it had come from his mother.

She scribbled his name on the front and sent it off on Meredith's leg, not wanting to think too much about reaching out to a person that she had spent a whole summer trying to avoid. Once Meredith had swooped down towards the Great Hall to deliver the note, she realised how hungry she was, the worry had been masking it but now it hit her and she knew that if she didn't have a plate full of scrambled eggs and buttery toast in front of her very soon, she would probably faint again, and she knew that if that happened, the combined worrying of Jac, Karen and Madame Pomfrey would mean she never left the Hospital Wing again.

She was so excited about the prospect of eating breakfast, and so desperate not to think about the letter that she didn't notice that someone was calling her name. Ted Moore stepped in front of her, smiling.

"Alright, Lily? How are you feeling?" He had turned and walked with her down towards the Great Hall.

"I'm good, feeling good. I have been better though!" She waved her bandaged arm, which Pomfrey had wrapped twice as thickly after the other night.

"Oh, yeah, of course... sorry!"

"S'okay. Don't worry about it. How are you?"

"I'm... yeah, I'm fine."

He seemed more than a little uncomfortable and she wasn't sure exactly what to say to him.

"Listen, Ted-" All she could think about with any measure of clarity was scrambled eggs. She was trying to decide whether she would have brown or white bread, and, though she liked Ted, she couldn't ignore the rumbling in her stomach for much longer. He stopped quite abruptly in the hallway, and turned to her.

"Would you like to go to Slughorn's party with me?"

There was a scuffing sound behind her, like someone skidding to a halt and she took a brief second to decide who would be the worst person to be witnessing this moment.

It was Adrian Tweedy, a Hufflepuff who was one of Rita's – friend didn't seem the right word – correspondents, and who had been admitted to the 'Slug Club' because he had taken some photographs that had appeared in the Daily Prophet.

He quickly skirted around them and walked up the hallway, looking back over his shoulder to confirm he had recognised both of their faces. She watched him for a second then turned back to Ted, a nervous smile already on her lips.

She saw that Ted looked exactly as embarrassed as she felt, knowing as she did that the news would be widespread by the time they were in their first class of the day.

"Well, that's a pretty efficient way of getting the entire school informed."

They laughed, but it was nervous laughter and died quicker than a real one would have. Lily thought about it, Ted was funny, and charming, and had asked her out, which was more than most people. She really liked him and it might be nice to show up at Slughorn's party with someone other than Jac. It would certainly not be boring.

"Yes, yes, I'd like to... go to Slughorn's party with you."

"Great! That's brilliant! I'll meet you at the Great Hall? At 7?"

She nodded, and he started back off the way Lily had just come, turning occasionally to smile and wave vaguely back at her. She stood, slightly dazed, in the hallway for a moment before remembering how hungry she was and starting to walk.

She was, surprisingly, able to eat three slices of toast and several mouthfuls of egg before Jac made an appearance, but Karen had already been in the Great Hall, her head buried in a book, when Lily got there. She looked up briefly, clearly wondering where Lily had been in the period between running out of the dormitory and reaching the Great Hall. Seeing that Lily wasn't showing any signs of physical harm and that she wasn't willing to talk about it, she left it alone and, after passing Lily a nearby jug of juice, she returned to her book.

Lily restrained herself from looking around to see Severus. She didn't want to look, first of all, but she also knew from experience that there would be no way to judge from his inscrutable face whether he had received the letter or if he intended to talk to her.

Just as she was finishing her juice, she saw a few stray owls were fluttering in. The Morning Post had already come, but some stragglers remained. It was as she looked up that she spotted Meredith. For a second she was wondering how on earth it had taken so long for the bird to fly from the Owlery to the Great Hall, but as she watched, it flew not towards the Slytherin table, but straight down to her. By this time, the Hall was full of people and Lily was almost hoping that whatever Meredith was carrying wasn't from Severus, because it would be far too difficult to read the letter with so many prying eyes.

Sure enough the second Meredith landed beside Lily, she heard James.

"Isn't that your bird? Sending yourself love letters, Evans?" It was the sort of thing that last year, or even a few months ago, she would have been sure was said as an insult, but now, she could see the humour in it. Still, she was a bit jumpy about the whole situation and only managed a weak smile in his direction. She untied the letter and immediately recognised the handwriting. Severus had answered.

She couldn't read it here. Knowing that everyone around her was, in their usual nosy manner, watching her to see what was being delivered, she tucked the letter into her robes, then looked up and lied.

"Petunia."

The one word was enough to make Jac and Karen uncomfortable, they knew that Lily's sister rarely sent friendly, chatting letters, and everyone else took their cue from the two girls and went back to their breakfast. As people began to trickle out of the hall on their way to first classes of the day, Lily dared a glance at the Slytherin table. She couldn't see Severus in the bustle, but her gaze was caught by Ted Moore, at the Ravenclaw table, who waved at her and smiled. He thought she had been looking at him, she realised and quickly waved and smiled back.

"Alright, Lily?" Alice walked in front of Lily's view and stopped briefly on her way out. "How're you? Looking forward to Slughorn's party?"

"Hmm... As much as ever!" Lily laughed, though she couldn't deny that the prospect of having a date, and a nice, funny one at that, made an evening talking to all of Slughorn's favourite pupils, old and current, a bit more appealing.

She said goodbye to Alice, and waited a few minutes more until all the Gryffindors who had been sentenced to Transfiguration, which was all of them except Peter and Karen, were ready, at which point they left the Great Hall.

McGonagall seemed to have completely forgot that Lily had recently been the subject of a brutal attack and Lily wasn't sure how to remind her without seeming like she wanted to get out of homework, which she did. The transfiguration homework was added into Lily's mental pile of things she desperately needed to do, but all of them seemed irrelevant compared to reading Severus's letter.

She managed to break away from the group at lunch, when she ducked into the bathroom, promising to meet them for lunch in a minute.

She quickly looked around to see that there was no one in the bathroom, but she didn't expect anyone to be in it, and she was right. This bathroom was one that most people avoided, because of Myrtle.

"Who's that?" a high, squeaky voice hiccupped, sounding very much like she had recently finished crying.

"It's no one important, just me..." Lily had been in the company for the ghost only a few times, and though the constant moaning was annoying, Lily could feel nothing but pity for the girl, who had been a student when she had died.

"Oh, the ginger one... I thought you might be the nice one."

"I am the nice one, just because I've got red hair, doesn't mean I can't be nice! And I'm closer to brown than ginger!" She plucked at the dark red hair on her shoulders, defensively. "Who's the nice one?"

"The blonde girl, the one who's always inventing spells? She tests a lot of them in here! Is it Pamela, Penelope?"

Myrtle obviously thought she was getting the girl into trouble, as there was a glint of satisfaction in her eye.

"Oh, Pandora? Yeah, she is nice!" She thought of the young girl, a few years behind Lily, who was often missing an eyebrow or sporting singed or smoking clothes because of some mishap or other.

Lily didn't really have time to argue with a ghost over who was nicer, so she walked across the bathroom and locked herself in a cubicle, hoping that Myrtle's sense of propriety would stop her from intruding further by popping her head through the door or the walls.

She pulled the paper from her pocket and pulled it from the envelope. The paper, folded once, showed the writing through the back, as if the writer had been pressing down on the paper so much as to nearly puncture it.

She read it quickly, refusing to see it as in any way related t her, looking at it as if it were a letter in a book, to and from someone she didn't know.

He agreed to meet, told her he would be in the library all evening, and told her not to bring anyone else along. That struck her as odd. Why would she bring someone, who did he think she might bring along? Still, she had to meet him, and if these were the rules she had to abide by, then she would have to go, and go alone.


	16. Don't Patronise me!

He had chosen a corner of the library that was particularly dark, particularly cold and particularly secluded. As Lily stood on the other side of a bookcase, trying to decide whether to abandon all the voices shouting at her not to speak to him, she thought that if she was to spend much more than five minutes here, they would very likely be interrupted by a couple looking for a different sort of privacy to the sort that Severus sought.

Taking a deep breath, the memory of her inability to do so upon their last meeting, she stepped out of the bookcase's shade.

"So, you made up your mind?" He didn't even look up from his book.

It seemed as if he was going to carry on reading, perhaps to give her time to run away, but she had come this far, and she was brave.

Wasn't she?

Forcing her legs to move, she somehow reached the table, and pulled out a chair opposite him. She felt impossibly uncomfortable as she sat down, like her limbs were broken and flimsy. She waited for him to look up, but he didn't and after a minute, in which she didn't think she had blinked once, she spoke.

"Can you stop that? Can you look at me?"

"That's rich, coming from the girl who spent all summer pretending not to see me."

Perhaps she wasn't as good an actress as she thought. Still, he had no right to act like the wounded party, and she wasn't about to let him, even now, when she had moved so far on.

"You know very well why I did that! That was and is your fault, and I'm not here to try to fix that."

"Then why?"

She couldn't believe how little emotion she could detect in him. Before, he had been measured, everything was guarded with him, but she had been the person with whom it was easier. She had seen him be cold, but only to others.

"The letter you wrote me."

"What about it?"

"What did it say?"

"Didn't you read it?" He seemed curious, and it was the first time he had given any real indication that he was listening to her. "How did you know to come here if you didn't read it?"

"No, not that letter, the one you gave to that boy, outside Gryffindor Tower, the night I was attacked."

"That wasn't for- Oh, I suppose he showed you all, had a good laugh, did you?"

She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but when Severus talked about a 'he' with the venomous tone he was using, it usually meant he was talking about James Potter.

"He didn't show me any letter. I mean the one you wr- Was that letter not for me?"

She felt so stupid. She had simply assumed that the only person Severus would want to speak to in Gryffindor was her. Had he written to someone else? Had he written to James?

It was perhaps because she had been more aware of his presence this year than in the past, when he had been a mildly irritating, sometimes amusing blip in the periphery, but it often seemed that James was nearby whenever she most wanted to avoid him. She looked away from Severus and spotted the four Gryffindor boys, huddled around a table in the library. She hadn't noticed them on her way in and they seemed to have been working quietly for some time, a fact which seemingly offended Sirius.

He had obviously at some point become bored and tried to amuse himself by conjuring flames from his wand. These flames, without the direction and control that came with practice, had spewed out and caught what looked like a rather large section of James' parchment. It had been James' response to the arson that had alerted Lily to his presence.

"You're dead, Sirius! Four bloody hours I've spent on that!"

Lily couldn't help herself, and she watched with the sort of amusement that she had quelled for Severus' benefit on past occasions. Back when they were friends, she would have stifled any laughter, and strained not to smile. She didn't even try now, watching as Sirius used shield charm after shield charm to deflect the range of quills, books and sweets that James was throwing at him from across the table. Then Madame Pince approached and Sirius quickly threw himself into his chair, picked up one of the books and pretended to be deeply engrossed.

"Mr Black, Mr Potter, if you cannot treat the library with the proper respect, you will have to leave!"

They all mumbled apologies and settled back around the table, with James pulling another piece of parchment from his bag, presumably to restart his essay.

Lily turned back around to Severus, the urgency of her task renewed.

"Did you write to James?"

"You read it."

"But I can't remember it."

There was something about his face, something that confused her, it was guarded, and displayed almost no emotion but Lily stared, feeling like something important had just passed between them but she wasn't able to put her finger on what it was.

"I can't remember what was in the letter." She repeated, and this time her eyes were fixed intently on Severus's face, looking to see if he would repeat whatever impulse had been on his face a moment ago. Nothing changed in the dark eyes, and he didn't even speak for a long time.

"That's probably for the best... It wasn't important, and it's resolved now."

"What is it? What did you say to him? What was in that letter?"

"I don't think it's for me to tell you. He was obviously so willing to let you see it, why don't you ask him? Perhaps over drinks at Slughorn's party? Or maybe when you're out on a date?" Severus wasn't the sort to storm off, he tended to stare her down, and then let her decide whether to leave. He did this now, and, where in the past her instinct had always been to stay, to talk to him, now she wanted nothing more than to run. She felt like she did that a lot, but, seeing as she couldn't bear to meet his eye, she quickly pushed herself away and made an escape, without another word, brushing past the Gryffindors, hoping they wouldn't see her.

No one called after her, and she made it safely out of the library with more questions than she could count shouting in her mind. She walked slowly back to the Tower, thinking and trying not to think.

The next morning, the whole school was buzzing. Because of the utter lack of any of the sort of school dances that their Muggle counterparts might have gotten dressed up and worked up for, the rare occasions for which formal dress, or anything that wasn't the school uniform, were a source of excitement. Therefore, Slughorn's party was the talk of the school. Mostly the discussion was focussed around two subjects, who was going with whom, and what would they be wearing. Lily, a guaranteed invite already secured by her place in the Slug Club, had to field many questions from friends and acquaintances in the hallways.

Darcy Mayhew almost pulled her arm out of her socket to ask her what colour she would be wearing, and a group of first years pushed one another up to her to ask what if it was true that she was going to charm her hair into flames for the evening. That one was so ridiculous that she could only laugh at it, and feel a little bit guilty that everyone, all those who wouldn't be attending the party, was so interested in what she would be wearing when she hadn't even considered it.

"What are you going to wear to the party?" she hissed to Jac, who had managed to get a spot beside Lily in the Defence against the Dark Arts class, as they practised the charm to produce a Patronus and shrugged. Neither she nor Jac had succeeded, and the inability was frustrating Lily. So far no one in the class had managed to work the spell correctly, though one of the Hufflepuffs had screeched with delight when they managed to create a thin stream of silver mist.

She didn't like practising in such a public setting something that involved a personal memory. It was worse than the time they had been through that lesson on boggarts and their teacher, who had been nearing the end of their tether with stress, had made them all write a long answer in class describing what they thought was their worst fear and how they would go about tackling it. Of course, everyone had spent the lesson trying to write as little as possible and sneak a look at anyone else's page.

"I bought that pair of robes at summer, but my mum said she might send something out... What about you?"

"Dunno... Don't suppose these will do?" Lily plucked at her uniform, and tried to think of anything she had packed that might be suitable. Somewhere at the bottom of her trunk was the robes that Jac had bought her, which Lily had tried to talk her out of, the deep blue colour and the soft velvet hadn't made an appearance so far though the layer of books and everyday clothes that covered the top of her trunk.

"Not a chance, not when I heard that Winnie is having her robes flown in from Paris. There's a bit of a minimum standard being set here, I don't think we can just turn up. A bit of effort's gotta be made!"

Lily groaning internally, and forced herself to focus on the spell. There wasn't long left in the class and she really wanted to have something to show for it. It was a particularly tricky but particularly useful spell and she desperately wanted to get it.

A happy memory. The happiest memory.

Her first thought had been something from her early childhood, with Petunia, in the park, or when she had first learned that those strange accidents were something that she could control, like jumping off the swing and floating to the ground. All those memories were soured, because there was no way she could remember any of them without her mind immediately travelling to her current relationship with Petunia, which was practically non-existent.

She immediately discounted anything that involved Severus, because there was no way she could bear to consider any of those, no matter how happy they might have been at the time, they were ruined for her.

That only left very recent memories, and none of those struck her as particularly happy.

She focussed everything on the day she had received her letter from Hogwarts, trying desperately to keep it separate from all the bad memories that surrounded it.

She had been standing in the dining room, on a chair, trying to keep the letter out of Petunia's hand. When her sister had realised that it was the school Severus had been talking about, and that the letter was dealing with 'freak' business, she had huffed, gave a sharp sniff in the air and walked out the room. Lily had stayed on the chair while she read the letter, and had read it about six times, over and over, looking for clues in the handwriting that might show that it had been written by Severus, as a continuation of a very long, drawn out joke.

She had clutched that letter close, and at that very second, the doorbell had rung, and Professor McGonagall had arrived. She was infinitely grateful that it had been McGonagall and not Flitwick, or Slughorn that had been charged with explaining to her parents the concept of magic and that there was a hidden world in their own. The Head of Gryffindor's directness and no-nonsense approach had been a vastly smoother introduction to the wizarding world than any of the other heads of house.

Focus on the letter, focus on the feeling.

Expecto Patronum.

Nothing. She tried to keep a scowl from her face and looked around, trying to look unconcerned, but checking everyone for looks of triumph and puffs of silver smoke. She would need to practice this one. Fortunately, it seemed that everyone else did too.

At lunch that day, Lily was very much preoccupied with the Patronus charm, and Jac was very much preoccupied with the upcoming party, and Karen was flirting with a Hufflepuff boy in an attempt to secure an invite. All in all, it was a very quiet affair for the three girls, occasionally punctuated with conversations from someone passing by, or a request to pass food over. In any case, Lily was aware of very little but her need to find a really happy memory and her practice of the wandwork needed for the whole time she was in the Great Hall. Jac eventually, as lunch was drawing to a close, pushed a magazine under Lily's nose, obscuring her view of the page in the textbook she had read at least ten times.

"Which do you prefer?" Jac pointed at two of the sets of robes that were part of a 'Witches Winter Collection'.

"I suppose the blue one? Not sure!"

"Nah, you'll be wearing blue and if we really are going to both be going without dates I'd rather we looked like a couple than twins!"

"Fair enough, then the pink?"

"Yeah, I think those are the nicest ones, with the little lace bit at the shoulders... And I can have my mum send the pink shoes too! I'll write to her now, d'you have some paper?"

Lily rummaged through her bag, but couldn't find anything and Jac turned around and began asking everyone, apparently she couldn't wait a moment longer to tell her mother about her desperate need for the pink shoes.

When someone passed her enough paper to write a quick note, she started to scribble and Lily, still focussed on the DADA class, mused out loud.

"What d'you think your Patronus is?"

"Well, considering it's absolutely refusing to be seen, it's probably a boggart. What are you hoping for?"

"I don't think it really matters, as long as its powerful..."

"'Course it matters, Evans!" Sirius chipped in, having exercised his usual restraint towards getting involved in other people's conversations. "A Patronus is a deep and accurate reflection of our inner selves, a big, shining, silver mirror, symbolising everything we are, and everything we hope to be!"

Everyone looked around in surprise.

"That was... oddly poetic." Lily said in confusion.

"Well isn't that just me all over!"

"So what kind of Patronus is 'oddly poetic' Sirius?"

"I'm thinking a lion, maybe a bear, who knows, something manly!"

"I thought you said it was supposed to represent you?" James snarked, dodging the bread crust that was immediately sent flying towards him.

"Well, what are you thinking for yours?"

"Lion isn't too bad, I wouldn't mind that."

"Well, you can't both be lions!" Jac pointed out.

"And why not? Didn't you hear Darroch, what he said about how patronuses could show a deep connection, or, what was it a 'significant bond' between two parties! If this isn't a significant bond," he reached dramatically across the table to James, who laughed and embraced him. "Then I don't know what is!"

"As long as I'm not a dung beetle..." Jac moaned.

"Or a snake." Peter laughed, with a dark look to the Slytherin table.

"Yeah, that'd be a bit of a slap in the face, to be a snake!" Sirius laughed to himself, but there was something bitter about it.

"What d'you want your Patronus to be, Lily? Apart from powerful, obviously."

"Not sure... I suppose it'll be interesting once we see them, to figure out what they say about us, I think we'll be able to tell quite a lot from their shape..." She was secretly hoping that the form of her Patronus might be something quite flattering, something she could be proud of, something strong, but she was, like everyone else, just a little worried that it would end up showing her something she didn't particularly want to see.


	17. A Few Mistakes were made

With one thing and another, she completely forgot to mention to Jac that she did in fact have a date for the Slug Club party, and it was only as she was lying on her bed, trying to do something for the transfiguration homework that she hadn't even vaguely understood in class, that she remembered that Ted had asked her to go with him.

Jac was reclining on her bed, Karen, Lynn and Beth all gathered on Lynn's bed as they tried to decide how to do their hair, all three of them having secured dates that afternoon.

"I can't believe I haven't got a date!" Jac whined.

"It's only because you were invited anyway. All the boys in our year were just trying to make sure that as many of us got to go as possible, so no one is left out." Beth reasoned with her kindly.

"But I didn't even get anyone who wasn't invited asking to go with me! Not even a first year!"

"Would you have said yes to a first year?" Lynn asked, incredulously.

"Well... no, but it would have been nice to be asked! It's the principle of the thing! Now it's just me and Lily, the dedicated spinsters!"

"Oh, well, actually..." Lily started, wondering how best to put the bad news that someone actually fancied her. "I have got a date..."

"Not...Snape!" Karen hissed.

"Of course not!" Lily returned, and there was a brief pause when all four of her friends did that irritating we-knew-this-thing-was-going-to-happen-even-though-you-said-it-wouldn't smirk, all of them meeting one another's' knowing gazes.

"Okay... what?" Lily eventually burst, wishing she had enough self-control to ignore them.

"Nothing, we...we were just wondering when you two were finally going to admit it... I think I owe you a galleon." Jac chuckled.

"I think it was two galleons!"

"You owe me one!"

"And me!"

Lily looked around confusedly as various amounts of money were exchanged.

"I didn't realise you knew about that... we've only spoken a few times!"

"Well, I suppose... but you've known one another quite a while, and he's had a crush on you since last year, when you cut your hair..."

Lily frowned, she had barely known Ted then, beyond a few passing conversations, and she was certain that none of her friends knew him. Certainly they didn't know him well enough to know that he had a crush on Lily.

"I don't think that's true. He was quite straightforward about asking me out earlier today, wouldn't he have done that ages ago if he did fancy me?"

"Well, he might have done, if you weren't friends with his worst enemy..."

"Ted and Severus don't even know one another, they're hardly enemies."

The tone in the room changed almost immediately. What had before been knowing glances seemed almost panicked, certainly confused.

"Ted?"

"Yeah, Ted Moore... who were you talking about?"

They immediately clammed up, and Lily couldn't get anything else out of them, not a word about Ted, or the Slug Club, or dress robes, or Patronus forms. She decided she would be better off in the Common Room, and packed up some of her books before getting out of what had quickly become a very quiet room.

She wasn't stupid, and she knew exactly who Severus's worst enemy had been. She knew exactly who they had been betting she would end up dating. What she couldn't work out was why on earth they thought that she was in any way suited to dating James Potter.

The Common Room was by no means quiet and it brought with it a very different set of distractions, chief amongst which was a noisy group of third years playing Exploding Snap by the fire. No one in Lily's year was anywhere to be seen and she settled down in the corner, in a big armchair with its back to most of the room and started to read about the inner workings of the Patronus charm.

She was just beginning to think that she could study her way through the emotional element of the charm, when she was struck by a sudden craving for a large mug of hot chocolate. Checking her watch, she weighed up the risks of running into Slytherins, teachers or Peeves against the benefits of having hot chocolate and it was really no contest. She was climbing out of the Portrait Hole within a few seconds and was on her way down the hall.

The house elves were always willing to help anyone who turned up at the kitchen. You could arrive at two o'clock in the morning and they would come rushing out, dressed in their Hogwarts-Crest adorned 'uniforms' and offer you a hundred different treats. They would prepare an entire meal if you asked them, and seemed desperate to hand out as much food as possible.

When Lily arrived at the kitchens, it was a lot earlier than two and they were still clearing up and reorganising everything from that night's dinner.

She asked very politely if she could make herself some hot chocolate and within seconds she was being offered a range of cakes and sweets to go with the drink, which she refused as kindly as she could.

She walked the entire way back to the Common room worrying that she was about to run into someone, and it was only once she was through the Portrait Hole and settled back into her armchair that she breathed properly.

Of course, she was then immediately interrupted.

"Evans!"

Sirius bounded over to her showing absolutely no awareness of the fact that she was very clearly avoiding looking at him. He threw himself over the back of her chair and lean over her, until his face was between her and her book.

"Alright?"

"I'm fine, Sirius, yourself?" There was something about the way Sirius did these ridiculous gestures that made it feel completely normal and she wasn't at all fazed by the sudden interruption.

"Not bad, not bad... How's Nigel?-Ow!"

Lily had closed her book sharply, catching him between its pages.

"How would I know?"

"I heard he was heartbroken, over you and your new boyfriend."

"Didn't think you were the sort to listen to gossip."

He shrugged and looked around.

"We heard some first years talking about it, you're quite the topic of discussion recently!"

"I'm sure."

Sirius waved to where James, Remus and Peter were presumably sitting.

"Come and sit with us, Evans. We're all desperate to hear the details!"

Lily pointedly opened her book back up and Sirius seemed to leave. She really ought to have known that there was no way Sirius would ever give up that easily, and a second later she felt the back of her chair tip back and felt the legs dragging across the ground as she was pulled through the middle of the Common Room and deposited, to general laughter from the groups watching the spectacle, beside a table at which the three boys sat, trying quite hard not to look amused. Lily decided she ought to make the best of it and adopted a nonchalant tone.

"Fancy seeing you lot here!"

"Incredible! How are you, Lily?" Peter smiled.

"I'm fine, Peter, just trying to get some reading done, what have you been up to?"

"We- We've been..."

"Oh, never mind, I'll let you keep your secrets, all part of the mystery, eh?"

All four of them looked a little relieved and Lily wondered what on earth they were doing, but she knew better than to press the issue.

"So..." Remus searched for a new topic. "What book is it that you're reading?"

She tilted the cover up towards him. "For Defence, I just want to get this Patronus thing sorted!"

"I don't think it's something you can get from reading, I think you have to just keep practicing."

"I know, but it couldn't hurt, right?"

"Honestly, Lily? You might be thinking too much about it, the Patronus is about feelings, it's a way to shield you from bad ones using a good one, it's something you need to feel."

Lily thought about that and realised he was right, there wasn't going to be some secret trick that she could learn to make this easier, it was going to have to come from her, and it was going to have to be something profound.

Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to be somewhere quiet and really decide what the happiest memory of her life was. She wasn't likely to be able to leave anytime soon though, and it took about three games of chess and one abortive attempt to explain one of the more difficult potions they had been studying to the group before she could get away, and then all she wanted to do was go upstairs, crawl into bed and sleep, which she did.

The next morning, Lily was woken up by Jacqueline, who was excited for something that Lily couldn't quite make out. When she disengaged her head from the tangle of pillows and blankets that she had been cocooned in, she found out that it was because today was Slughorn's party. Despite the fact that they still had a full day of classes ahead of them, Jac was up bright and early with a most uncharacteristic smile on her face.

"Lily! Wake up... let's go get breakfast?"

"Okay, okay! I'm coming!" Lily was up and dressed in five minutes, hurried along by an excited Jac who seemed to have already tested out her hairstyle for that evening, if the assortment of hairpins littering the space around her bed and the magazine in front of her open at a page entitled 'Enchanting Hairdos for the Enchantress in You!'.

They dragged Karen down the stairs between them and headed into the Great Hall, and once seated they each started scanning the table for their favourite foods. It was the sort of day that just had the feeling of being good and because of this, if felt like you ought to celebrate it, even before it happened. Jac heaped scrambled egg and sausages onto the gold plate that had appeared before her. Karen focussed on the fruit, and seemed to be building a mountain of strawberries and raspberries.

Lily took a piece of toast and thought about being sensible, but quickly decided that there was nothing she wanted more than a very large plate of fried food. Deciding that she might as well enjoy herself, she reached across and started spooning food onto her plate. She had a very strong feeling that today was going to be a good day.

Even a day full of the worst classes that Hogwarts could throw at her didn't dent Lily's feeling that the party was worth looking forward to and immediately after dinner she was swept up in a stampede to the Dormitories where the intensive process of getting ready began.

Lily's hair was still at the length that made the elaborate hairstyles that most people were attempting far too difficult. She had seen one or two people asking each other in corridors for hair-lengthening charms, but that was a bit extreme in Lily's view, and the hair was never so healthy afterwards.

Jac's preparation had paid off and she was ready far quicker than anyone else, which she took as an opportunity to float around the room, helping everyone else get ready. This quickly became annoying and she was sent to retrieve something for them to drink.

That was their first mistake.

By the time they were expected at Slughorn's party, all of the girls in the Gryffindor dormitory were drunk, though in varying degrees. Lily was by no means the worst, that ignominious honour could only go to Karen, who seemed to be under the impression that she was on a very small boat, on a very rough sea. She leant into Lily as they walked down stairs and through corridors, and by the time they made it to the dungeons that had been made over as Slughorn's venue for the evening, Lily was sporting a slightly numb arm from being grabbed so often for support. Jac had at least managed to walk unaided, but she appeared to be unaware of how loud her voice needed to be, and occasionally yelled in Lily's ear. A combination of the cold air that seeped through her thin dress robes, and the volume of Jac's comments, she was feeling as if she had never even seen that bottle of illicit firewhiskey.

Lily felt bad for foisting a teetering Karen onto Jac, but she was barely falling over any more, the walk had helped, and she really needed to go meet Ted.

Darting back up through the passage to the dungeon, she made it to the Great Hall, just as Ted appeared at the top of the stairs. She smiled and gave a little half-wave, then spent the few seconds in which he descended the stairs fixing her hair, which she was suddenly extremely self-conscious about, and noticing her breathing more than she ever had before.

"You look lovely."

"So do you!" Lily answered enthusiastically. "No! I mean, you look... not that you don't look lovely, you do, but... Hi!"

He laughed, and she blushed horribly.

"Shall we go? I've heard that Slughorn's got a few special guests, you know, old 'Slug Club' members, to visit. I suppose he'll be making introductions!"

Lily thought that sounded very Nigel-ish, but his tone was joking where Nigel would have been earnest, and she sensed that he thought about Slughorn's habit of making favourites of his students and 'collecting' success stories in very much the same way she did.

They rounded the corner and saw the entrance to the party at the same moment. Nearly blinded by the brightness, Lily blinked and looked away. Some kind of white material had been draped around, no doubt magically, from the ceiling and a thousand lights twinkled overhead, through the thin gauze of the material.

The scene, as well as the cacophonous noise that accompanied it, was somewhat overwhelming, but Lily was a little relieved that the party was loud and busy, as right now, she couldn't think of a single thing to say to Ted and as the seconds passed she was feeling more and more dull, more and more boring. Taking in the room as they passed through the doors, she could see neither Jac nor Karen, who seemed to have managed to make it into the party, judging from the fact that neither of them were lying sprawled in the corridor.

She was almost immediately spotted by Slughorn, who had taken up his characteristic position by the door to welcome guests in.

"Ah, Lily! Ted, m'boy! Is this a little romance blooming? Well, don't let this old man spoil your evening! Lily, I won't take you away for long, Thaddeus, if you'll excuse us, I really must introduce you to Helena Proudfoot, she's an old student of mine, and showed a kill in Potions from early on, not unlike yourself. Of course, she didn't pursue it, but she's doing very well... Ah, Helena! Here's the star pupil I was telling you about!"

Lily waved a goodbye to Ted over her shoulder but was powerless to say anything as she was already being whisked off to speak to Helena Proudfoot, whoever she was.


	18. A Party and a Patronus Progresses

As it turned out, Helena Proudfoot was, though Lily didn't want to admit it, quite extraordinary. She had been excellent in Potions at school, a fact that Slughorn loudly announced, to Helena's visible discomfort, and she had went on to be excellent in various fields. Only eight years after leaving Hogwarts, she was in a position with the Ministry in which she worked overseas, interacting with wizards in other countries in matters that she couldn't tell Lily about, but that seemed to involve speaking a range of languages, including Mermish, and on one particularly risky occasion, saving the Minister of Magic for Turkey from a dragon.

She was Lily's ideal self. She was tall, and thin, and her hair was a bright blonde and seemed to sit in a natural wave that Lily could have never achieved. She spoke with humour, but not arrogance about the range of adventures that her job afforded her. She was interesting, funny and modest and Lily was desperately trying to control the vaguely dreamy look that was drifting into her eyes as she listened to a story about a goblin, a barrel of gunpowder and the Latvian Minister of Finance.

Lily hadn't been counting, but she was interrupted in her hero worship when Slughorn returned. It was a testament to how long Lily had spent talking to – alright, staring at – Helena, that Slughorn had managed to do an entire lap of the party and make it back to them. She reluctantly released Helena to talk to someone else and went to look for Ted, who she was feeling a bit guilty about having abandoned. After all, she had agreed to come to the party with him, and then left him moments after they arrived.

She did a quick tour of the party, greeting people as she passed and occasionally stopping to chat or ask if they had seen Ted, and eventually found him, chatting with a few Ravenclaws, and apologised for being such a bad date.

He was, of course, absolutely charming about it.

"Couldn't have you losing a golden opportunity to connect with other Slug Club members, we are a rare breed!" He clutched at his chest and sniffed pompously.

She couldn't help but laugh and by the time he had handed her a drink, thankfully alcohol-free, they were chatting like old friends.

An hour later, Lily was dancing. She wasn't opposed to dancing, not by a long shot, but there was something slightly surreal about the situation she found herself in. Well into the wine that the house-elves were supplying to the of-age attendees, Slughorn had called in the musicians and the songs had started, and everyone seemed to converge on what was now a dance floor, and Lily found herself being twirled around, limbs of people nearby flying dangerously, and drinks being sloshed about. She finally spotted some familiar faces in the melee, and was glad to see that Jac had found someone to dance with. Sirius and James were attempting some kind of comedy routine in which they danced a sort of tango with Jac and Helen Carr respectively, but without breaking a longing eye contact between them. It was going down well with the onlookers, who were laughing uproariously, but perhaps less so with Helen, who seemed somewhat put out to be second in her date's affections.

She turned back to Ted who was watching the elaborate pantomime with amusement. Lily couldn't help the laughter that erupted out of her, and she kept smiling, and swaying to the music, as she watched.

Sirius and James decided that a grand finale was needed, and as the music swelled to a close, they spun furiously across the floor away from one another, threw their partners away, somewhat carelessly and charged back towards one another for a final twirling embrace.

The room erupted in cheers as the song closed, and all the musicians, who hadn't realised they were providing an accompaniment to the dramatics of the Potter and Black Theatre Company, and seemed rather pleased by the positively rapturous reaction.

As James dipped Sirius, he met Lily's eye and smiled. She couldn't hide her amusement, and, happily, she realised she didn't need to. She wasn't being disloyal to Severus, she wasn't laughing at someone's pain, she was simply finding something funny, and it was nice not to have some great moral question hanging over her head when faced with one of James' jokes.

The band started another song, buoyed by the apparently positive reaction, but Lily's feet, which had been trodden on too many times, were aching and she happily agreed to leave and let Ted walk her back to the Common Room. As they walked, Lily couldn't help but think how easy he was to talk to, perhaps too easy, as she felt like she was talking too much. It was only when they made it to the foot of the stairs and were saying goodnight that Lily fell silent, wondering whether she ought to hug him, whether a handshake was weirdly formal, and whether a kiss was overly friendly.

He answered the question for her when he stepped forward and, very lightly and almost questioningly, kissed her on her lips.

It was a wonderful feeling and she smiled in spite of herself. She wanted so desperately not to think of anything other than how nice this moment was, but she couldn't help it. She hadn't cared about romance, about dating and flirting in so long. She had never been crazy about it, but the past months had been filled with so much seriousness that the light, fluttering feeling in her stomach was very welcome, and she wasn't at all inclined to stop.

She was forced to stop when the sound of a number of footsteps clattering towards them reached her ears. She didn't particularly care if she was seen by a student but it was closing in on the time when the caretaker would be prowling, just praying to find students out of bed in the castle's corridors and she didn't want to end her night with a detention.

"I should go, but I had a really good time!"

"Me too... D'you want to go out with me?" The way he said it was so straight-forward, so direct that it almost threw her off. She wasn't used to things being this... uncomplicated. Ted wanted to go out with her, and there wasn't a shadow of a doubt in her mind that she wanted to go out with him. She was just basking in the glow of not having to dissect every word of a sentence for a meaning when she realised it had been quite some time since she had spoken and Ted, as relaxed as he was, was beginning to look a little nervous. Not wanting to leave him waiting, she blurted out an answer.

"God, yes!" Then she realised how odd and desperate she sounded and flushed, stammering a little. " I mean, yeah! Yeah, that sounds nice... I'd like that."

She looked around, trying to hide her face as she prayed that one of the knights in the painting of the jousting competition would charge at her with a lance and cause a distraction from the fact that she was such a bright shade of red. None of the paintings came to her rescue though, and she had to save herself. She turned to go through the portrait hole, trying to let the happiness of the night overshadow the awkwardness that had marred its last moments.

"I better go. It's... Yeah!" That was about enough awkward stuttering for one evening. She whispered the password to the Fat Lady who nodded and, with a look that was altogether too knowing for Lily's liking, she swung forward to admit her to the Common Room.

"Lily?" Ted called to her as she stumbled into the hole, and she looked back. "How is next weekend? Are you busy?"

"Nope, not at all... I'll look forward to it."

She was buoyed slightly by the smile on his face and the way he nodded, slightly dazed as she turned away again.

She had a date. She hadn't had one of those in a while. She climbed into the Common Room, and heard the portrait swing shut to conceal her and let the massive smile that had been easing its way onto her face since the evening began.

It had been a very good night. And she was inclined to think that this upwards trend might continue. She was, in a pleasant change, hopeful.

It was in this spirit of optimism and hopefulness that Lily approached the issue of the Defence against the Dark Arts class, and the challenge of casting a Patronus. It had been a topic of discussion among the sixth years, with close analysis of exactly how close each person had come to casting one, and the techniques those closest to success had used. Lily had taken Lupin's words, about it having to come from the heart, and was hoping that the ability, the answer, would just come to her. She wasn't sure, truthfully, if there was an answer, as it didn't seem like a question. Still, she was hopeful and riding high on the promise of her upcoming date, she walked through the door of Professor Darroch's classroom, her wand already in her hand, feeling certain that this was the day when everything would come together.

"Alright everyone! Stand up!" As chairs were scrapped back and everyone shuffled to the side of the classroom, Professor Darroch waved his wand and the tables flew to the other side, piling up on one another until the classroom was cleared. He waved for everyone to spread out.

"You know what to do. Another day of Patronuses. Maybe one of you'll be lucky enough today."

Jac turned to her, struck by an idea.

"Why don't you use your lucky potion? I hadn't thought of that."

"I'm saving it!" Lily replied. She wasn't sure what she was saving it for but she knew that even if luck helped her cast a Patronus once, it wouldn't help her in the long run. This was something that she needed to learn the hard way, even if that meant that she was the last person in the class to manage it. She shook her head, then took a place net to Jac and tried to focus.

Happy memories. She had been working on that. She thought back to before Hogwarts, back to her mother. She missed her so much, and that had always brought a tinge of sadness to even the nicest memories. That sadness had made her think that these memories were useless for a Patronus. Still, there was a happiness there, if a strange sort and she had tried all her other sorts of happy memories.

The happiness in memories of her mother was deeper, more enduring and she trusted it.

Searching through her childhood, she settled on one that stood out above the others. There was a day, back before she had known she was a witch, before Petunia hated her, before Severus mattered to her, before Hogwarts was anything other than a strange word. It had been a weekend, and she had been woken up by the sound of her parents singing and dancing their way towards her room, each of their voices were still clear to her ears. She had heard her door open and her parents announce that they were going to the beach. This wasn't an uncommon occurrence, she had been whisked off on an adventure with her parents more than once, and they were very rarely planned. She had been dressed quickly and bundled, with her blanket wrapped around her to protect against the winter chill of the early morning, into the grumbling old car, next to Petunia who was grumbling even louder. They had set off, and driven for so long that Lily was sure they must have left the country. Then, they reached the sea and the day had dissolved into a whirl of ice cream, fish and chips and sand, sand everywhere. There was a very clear moment in Lily's mind. A wave had just crashed over the unsuspecting heads of Lily and Petunia, and their reactions had been very different, Petunia gasped and began to cry, Lily had laughed. They had both been quickly swept up in a hug by their mother, and it was that second, the salt of the sea in her eyes and the warmth and security that her mother brought to everything that Lily focussed on now, years later, in the Defence against the Dark Arts classroom, miles away from any place in which her mother, whose soothing voice rang in Lily's ears, had set foot. She squeezed her eyes shut, and took a breath. Then she spoke.

"Expecto Patronum" She didn't shout, she didn't need to, the feeling of magic, of power, that rushed, like blood, through her veins was stronger than any cry. She was hoping to see some animal take shape, she was simply feeling the memory almost seep out of her pores, it was stronger than her, that memory was more powerful than she could be alone. She felt, more than saw, the light streaming from her wand. It was more than vapour, there was a shape, but it was hazy, and she couldn't have given it a name. Unless her Patronus was going to take the form of a cloud, she wasn't quite there yet, but it was progress, and it was closer than anyone else had come.

Her attention wavered and the figure vanished, but everyone had seen it and there were a range of expressions on their faces, from admiration to jealousy.

"Ah! Progress!" Professor Darroch smiled, bringing the attention of perhaps the two students who weren't already staring at her to the accomplishment. She wished that such a moment of personal triumph didn't have to take place in such an exposed environment. She would have preferred to revisit memories of a painfully distant past somewhere away from so many eyes. Still, she couldn't deny a certain measure of pride radiated from her as she tried to smile graciously.

A moment later, everyone had been ordered to carry on, and she was no longer the centre of attention as everyone returned to their own heads.

The rest of the class passed, slowly, with increasingly frustrated attempts to conjure something out of the air, and Lily was no better off for her early success. The lesson ended without a second appearance of any amount of silver smoke, and she gathered up her bag feeling somewhat deflated, though not without hope that she was progressing.

"Not bad, Evans! You might even be better at this Patronus stuff than me!" James slung his bag over his shoulder and walked with her out of the class.

"Wouldn't be hard!"

"Oh, check you out, full of yourself, aren't you?"

"Well, remind me, exactly how many times have you conjured a Patronus?"

"Actually..." He had that 'I'm-about-to-prove-you-wrong look on his face, but he closed his mouth and sighed. "Fair enough, you might be in the lead right now."

She was a bit surprised by the speed with which he conceded this one, it wasn't like him at all to admit to anyone being better than him at anything. She must have showed the surprise on her face and there was an easy laugh shared between them.

"So, how was Slughorn's party for you?"

"Great, really great. I saw that you enjoyed it too, you were really quite involved in the dancing!"

He laughed again.

"Can't help myself. I'm a natural and it seems a waste to hide such a talent."

"Of course."

"See ya later, Evans! Keep practising!"

"Patronus or dancing?"

"Both. Fancy a lesson?"

"In which?"

"Either."

"Well, I'm better than you at Charms, and I don't think that natural ability at dancing is something you can teach!"

He shrugged good-naturedly, and ruffled her hair before darting off through a door that led god-knows-where.

As she smoothed her hair back down, she caught up with Jac and Karen, and linked her arm in with Karens' and tried not to think about dancing lessons.


End file.
